Myrrh

ONCE AGAIN, I passed the huge Rock of Gibraltar, only this time with friends and transport. Before us in the distance, we could already see the charcoal silhouette of the Atlas Mountains of North Africa.

The sun went down, a red disk over the heaving and turbulent inkiness where the Mediterranean and the Atlantic meet. The sky was already indigo and the clouds were deep red and black with silver edges. Behind us the Rock of Gibraltar withered and was obscured by a red and misty haze. And so we left Babylon.

As we celebrated our departure from Europe, I was only too aware that we’d arrived in a Spanish town and that the real Africa, what I’d started thinking of as Black Africa, was still thousands of kilometres further to the south, on the far side of the Sahara. Even that was protected from Europe by mountains so impressive that they were named after Atlas, the Titan who holds up the sky. And before those obstacles, there was another: Morocco. I wondered just how well my travelling companions could handle the sirens on the rocks – the scammers of Morocco that I’d fallen foul of just a few months earlier.

But on the wrong side of the Sahara or not, we were in Africa. And this time, I wasn’t going to be drawn back by Mama or anyone else. It was the earth of my destination, the homeland of the Lion of Judah. Avoiding Tetouan, the town I had visited on my first trip to Morocco, we headed toward Tangiers.

Our first mission was to get some fresh veggies, fish and spices in the township of Ksar es Sghir. Not long after arriving we were invited into the local cafe for Moroccan green mint teas and a smoke of kiffe (chopped marijuana and tobacco) through long clay pipes. Our presence in the cafe didn’t go unnoticed. We had a queue of locals coming to try to speak with us, albeit in Arabic. Except for a few clumsy flirtations in random European languages, the girls were mostly avoided. Moroccan women seldom visit cafes and the local men didn’t really know how to politely interact with them. One tall man wearing a djellaba and a beanie told us in a broken composite of English, Spanish, French and German that we had done the right thing avoiding Tetouan, but that it was perhaps not the right thing to go to Tangiers either.

‘We’re planning to go further south,’ I said. The man replied that perhaps we should go a long way further south, if we were to avoid ‘some worst people of Morocco.’ He said we would only be safe south of Larache.

The man’s advice was taken to heart, and when trying to leave we had just about everyone in the village fight for the opportunity to pay for our drinks, including the person who ran the cafe. After vainly attempting to pay our tea bill ourselves, we got back on the road. The others were ecstatic, convinced Moroccans were the warmest people on earth.

Bebe and Claude ate up the kilometres ahead of us. Ruth and Mishka drove into the night. When Ruth got tired, I took over. Completely unlicensed and inexperienced, but loving the freedom I imagined Africa was bringing, I drove 100km until we found a deserted road leading seaward through a eucalyptus forest, a couple of miles south of Larache. Some way down that road was a clearing, flat and grassy – a perfect campsite.

Even in the middle of the night, this little stretch reminded us of Australia, the smell of eucalyptus and its branches silhouettes against the moonlit sky. Ruth and I slept on an eiderdown and used a broken tent as a ground sheet. The others had bedrooms suitable for lovers: Bebe and Claude.

In the morning, I talked about the thrill of driving. Anne said that she too would like to drive, even though she had no licence. Chris admitted that he had no idea how to drive a car, and therefore would be left as the only non-driver. He said this made him feel ‘totally jealous.’

‘Well he can learn. Here and now!’ yelled Mishka from afar, throwing Bebe’s keys at Chris. Chris threw them back.

‘I will,’ he replied, ‘but not right here, at the camp, because I’ll probably kill someone.’ So Mishka invited Chris into the passenger seat of Claude and they went off to find a place for his first lesson.

While they were gone (and they were gone for a long time) a shepherd came by. Like one of the shepherds of the Bible he brought gifts of golden incense-like hashish. It was as soft and fluffy as fairy-floss and a natural raw umber colour. You could smell its sweet aroma from three feet away. It felt waxy to touch and shrank when you touched it. For me it wasn’t just a gift, it brought on a memory. I recalled Focus describing the shepherd’s gifts for Mary and Joseph being remarkably similar (‘Not gold and incense and myrrh, it was golden incense and myrrh-ijuana!’). And here we were – two days into our journey into Africa, being bestowed with the very same honour. But before we could smoke it, Mishka and Chris returned on foot.

Mishka spoke. ‘Chris started to drive. He easily learned about the pedals, was really going well and really digging it. I got him to go faster, though he wasn’t speeding or anything. Suddenly there was a corner and so he turned, but the road was sandy and he lost control…When the traction came back, WHAM! So now Bebe has a gum-tree in her engine. We’ll need Claude to get it out and if it’s not already scrap metal it will have to be towed back to Larache for extensive repairs.’

Mishka drove Claude beside us at a funereal pace as we walked alongside. Claude had all our gear thrust in him and there was no room for passengers.

Arriving at the site of the accident, we saw Bebe lying like a corpse with a spear though her heart. ‘Don’t abandon me!’ she whispered. So we pulled and towed and thrust and dug and pushed and we talked about using Bebe as scrap parts and going across the Sahara all six of us in one car. But Claude didn’t like the sound of that and protested by starting to stall under the strain of parting his loved one from the tree. We figured if that was the way he felt, we must save Bebe. And on that note of optimism, Bebe’s tree snapped from the bonnet, and with a twang leapt backwards. Abby, Ruth and I all kissed the tree and apologised. It had lost lots of bark, and would either die or live its life permanently disfigured by the memory of Bebe. We also kissed Bebe better and Claude for being so brave. Only Chris was miserable.

‘I told you I couldn’t drive!’

Mishka and Chris pried open the bonnet and called Ruth, Abby, Anne and me to help survey the damage. Miraculously the engine was untouched. It seemed that only the water-cooling system and the battery had been mashed. The doors were a little out of place, and perhaps the front wheels didn’t seem to be in the right place. Maybe the axle was broken or the chassis bent? To us, Bebe looked salvageable.

Claude towed Bebe back to the campsite where we lit up the shepherd’s golden incense to cheer up Chris. I told him about Focus’s insight about the shepherds and the gifts of the Magus Kings. Chris was as high as the trees that we were camping under. ‘Fucking shit it was myrrh that the shepherds gave Jesus. It was this! This is a king’s gift, dude! This is the shit! What the fuck is myrrh anyway? Maybe it’s an ancient name for hashish! No for this – ’cause this ain’t no ordinary shit! This is myrrh, dudes! Smoke it like a king…’

In the morning there was more talk of going to Larache to find a mechanic. The team was chosen. Although I was the only one with any knowledge of the country, and was acutely aware that we hadn’t exactly passed Larache, the others were really eager to see the town, and I didn’t try to stop them. I warned them about scammers one last time. Bebe and I were to be the only ones staying behind to guard the camp, and Bebe was in no state to help much. She was stable, but unconscious.

The others were going to be gone awhile, so I worked on my tarot cards with the help of the golden incense. I finished the suit of wands – the cards that collectively described one’s spiritual journey. It was significant that those should be finished now that I was in Africa. The rest of the cards would follow as we travelled further.

When all of my other tasks had finished, I took Mishka’s Psychic Tarot and read them. In the past, there was the Ace of Pentacles: a new thing (possibly the purchase of Bebe). In the recent past there was the Three of Hearts reversed, which literally means break-up. In this context: Bebe’s crash. In the present and future positions there was a bunch of signals and signs…be warned of burglars, some friendly characters (was that us or them?), some violence…delays and difficulties. Eventually peace would return, but only as we left the trouble behind. It’s nothing to worry about, I thought, if all is well that ends well. And I gave the reading little more thought.

Just after dusk, Claude pulled in. Mishka drove and someone that I hadn’t met was seated beside him. My mind flicked back to the esoteric symbols of the tarot. Mishka leaped out of the car to introduce his acquaintance, Mohammed.

I introduced myself in the few words of Arabic I’d remembered from my previous visit, ‘Salaam Alaikum. Isme Jan.’ I was surprised that Mishka would be stupid enough to bring anyone home from Larache. I turned my head to address him in Tok Pisin, a language we’d both learned in Papua New Guinea as kids. ‘Bratao! Olya lin ikowe? (Where are the others, brother?)

Still not understanding my reticence, he responded in English. ‘They all went for a wander in the markets. They will catch a cab back here. Mohammed suggests that we go and camp by the beach. He knows a good place there.’ My eyes shifted to Mohammed.

‘What brings you here, out of Larache and into the jungle?’

‘Please, Michigan offered me dinner here and I’m very honoured, thank you. I gave him some green tea and bread in town, and he so generously accepted. We bought some nice things to cook for dinner. I shall happily make the tagine. It shall be beautiful.’ What did he want? Was he just casing the place so that he could decide what to steal later?

Just as we were stumbling through our rigid conversation, three figures came wandering in. It was already dark and it was only when they were in the orb of light from the fire that I realised that the third, another handsome young Moroccan, wasn’t one of us.

‘Hello Abby, Ruth and friend,’ I said, deliberately resting my eyes on the new face, politely intimidating him. ‘Who is this? Shall I be introduced?’ I continued, wanting Abby and Ruth to know that the Moroccan wasn’t really welcome. I could tell by their body language, and by the lack of introduction, that they’d not brought this one deliberately. Abby’s and Ruth’s eyes were on Mohammed, and Mohammed’s were on the other newcomer. They said a few quick and deliberately slurred words to each other in an Arabic dialect. Settling down by the fire, the man introduced himself. His English was at least one third French, and another third was Spanish. His speech was broken as if he intended the gaps to stand in for the polite words that he’d never learned.

‘My nom is Ahmed. House…Larache. Mes amis Abby, Ruth. Mi amigo…’

I didn’t bother making myself sound polite for this one. I didn’t bother with Arabic either. ‘My name is Jan, and this is Mohammed.’ I knew that, in a small town like Larache, Mohammed and Ahmed must’ve known each other since the younger of them was born. ‘No doubt you’ve come to make tagine as well?’ Ahmed didn’t pick up on my nuance, but it wasn’t really intended for him. He must have thought that I asked him to make dinner.

‘I buy good poisson pour tagine.’ But now aha! His eyes lit up dramatically as he pulled a dark brown lump from his trouser pocket. ‘Zero zero. Best quality.’ He started to roll up by the light of the fire. Mohammed had already organised himself one of the Spanish pocket-knives and was cutting onions like it was his campsite.

The crunch of another vehicle approaching could now be heard. The noise triggered something in Abby’s mind and she went and put on a tape of Nina Simone. She had bought some batteries in Larache. ‘Night-time is my time for just reminiscing. Regretting instead of forgetting…’ And out of a cab, another three figures approached in the dark: Anne and Chris, who introduced us to their new friend, Aziz.

‘Three chefs! There’s a saying about that! Come and join your friends in the collective effort to make a tagine!’ I mocked, drawing on the joint and passing it on to Chris.

‘Oh, I’m already so stoned. We’ve been smoking for hours,’ admitted Anne as she leant over to warm herself on the fire. ‘Hi everyone. My name is Anne and this is Chris.’ Anne wasn’t in the slightest bit suspicious of the other strangers.

Staying until late in the night, our new acquaintances seemed nice enough, but what conman doesn’t? When listening to a Bob Marley song, Ahmed announced that he had been a Rastafarian, so I liked him most, but I still didn’t trust him. I knew these people were scammers. Had they not been, then they wouldn’t have clung to Mishka, Abby, Ruth, Chris and Anne like barnacles.

Eventually I made noises about their departure. They had already worked out their strategy in Arabic.

‘Michigan, you drive me and Ahmed to Larache. Aziz will stay to help you find the engineer. Six clock early. You not possible find engineer without Aziz.’ Mohammed laughed. It was true enough. The ancient roads and routes through Moroccan towns were impossible even with a map, and finding the mechanic would be very difficult without help, besides I’d already learned that the scammers who work in the ‘tourist industry’ and the educated speak Latin-based languages, but most others don’t and I doubted whether a simple mechanic would be among the educated classes here in Morocco. I didn’t want to get further enmeshed, but we were snared in a Moroccan trap; now all we could do was to use it to our advantage and avoid being eaten alive.

‘Thanks for the advice. But we have women here, so please return to town. In the morning we’ll go in and I have absolute confidence you’ll find us.’ I smiled.

I gave Mishka a more specific warning in Tok Pisin, knowing that nobody else would understand, even if they were sober. So he summoned the Moroccans to the car to take them back into town. I borrowed Mohammed’s trick, and spoke with the others in whatever Australian slang I could muster, warning them, ‘Our new best mates are crooks and if the stooge stays, he’ll be scrounging around, so come the raw prawn and don’t do the fella a favour. Take your shit to your swag coz these fellas aren’t here to shake hands, eh?’

At the crack of dawn we stirred and woke. We were anxious to get the car repaired as soon as possible and to get out of Larache. While we were eating couscous boiled in milk, Mohammed, Aziz and Ahmed returned by taxi.

‘You are not ready! See, the sun is high. We must be quickly, quickly,’ Mohammed bustled. He, Aziz and Ahmed didn’t seem like the type to rise for the pre-dawn call to prayer. But today they clearly had, although perhaps their prayer was that we hadn’t shaken them off in the night. Mohammed’s pushy manner grated on my early morning nerves.

‘Be patient, brother,’ I said.

‘Why do you sleep here in the forest? So far from Larache?’ Ahmed asked in a manner which sat somewhere between confusion and contempt. He was probably hurting in his hip pocket because of the taxi fare.

‘To keep away from bums like you,’ I replied under my breath.

‘One good camping. À la beach. À côté de la ville,’ he continued his campaign.

‘We like it here. I like the trees. The eucalyptus reminds me of home. We like it here because we are far from Larache,’ I said forcefully. The girls had however picked up on the word ‘beach’ and were reflecting on their white legs and the weather.

‘That sounds really great,’ Abby said. At that point I decided not to persevere. It was after all their journey too, and just as I had to make my mistakes, they had to make theirs – and none of them had been scammed yet, so they weren’t too concerned. I would have other chances to rescue my friends but, for the time being, Bebe had to go to town. Chris and I decided to remain behind while Claude would tow Bebe and the others into town. They took some things that just couldn’t get wet, and some other things in the boot because we could no longer store anything in Bebe.

As soon as Chris and I were alone I spilled out my fears about our Moroccan acquaintances and their spurious advice. Chris agreed. The beach wouldn’t be a wise place to go, at least not if it were near Larache.

In the late afternoon, most of the others returned except Mishka, Aziz and Ahmed.

The girls were buzzing: ‘We’re moving to the beach! It’s a great spot, there’s a boat and… it’s going to be getting dark soon, so lets pack up and go and drop the stuff off in the other campsite!’ Abby chimed in.

‘Chris and I aren’t sure whether this is a good idea. Is this place far from Larache? Is it secluded?’ I asked, finding myself pulling the tent fly down.

‘Yeah, it’s great!’ the girls replied in unison.

I had no grounds for suspicion except for the intuitive sort that didn’t count.

Before long, Claude pulled up at a pretty little stretch of gumtrees cosily set behind some huge dunes that presumably led to the beach. There were a few people milling about, and the camping spot was only a hundred metres beyond a sealed road so I knew our privacy was shot.

In the last breaths of the afternoon light, I saw Mishka, Aziz, Mohammed and one or two others. They were brought to me as I unloaded.

‘This is Mustafa and this is Hermann,’ Mohammed presented the two new figures to me. Mustafa was a brawny and weathered Moroccan who might have once worked on a smuggling trawler. Hermann was a German. He appeared to be in his mid-twenties, had perhaps once been well shaven but had obviously not worried about that for a few days. He wore blue jeans and a neat woollen jumper. I thought Hermann was probably a traveller, in Morocco to make a small-time hash deal. Something to sell back in Stuttgart. While I was in the mood for evaluation, I sized up Mohammed again. He looked about forty-five but was probably a lot younger. Somewhere I’d noticed a flicker – a flash of paranoia behind his otherwise wise eyes. His inscrutability was far too practised. This one, I thought, is dangerous.

Mohammed, Ahmed, Mustafa and Hermann left early in the evening when it started to rain. Mustafa and Hermann wandered off into the trees and Mohammed and Ahmed down the sealed road, toward the beach. So there is more than a beach down there, I thought to myself. Aziz found an old piece of our tent from Madrid and slept under it by the fire. I didn’t like being kept under permanent guard, but nobody else expressed more than a grumble.

In the morning, I was to go off to Larache with Chris, Anne and Aziz. The others, including Mustafa (who had emerged from the trees bright and early), were going to mind the camp and to bathe in the sea. Aziz somehow managed to communicate that we didn’t need to take the car. We wandered down the sealed road that I thought was to the beach. I was wrong. In a couple of hundred metres, the road ended and we took a track through the sand dunes and shrubs. And suddenly, beyond an old ruined fort wall, on the other side of a small sheltered harbour, was the town of Larache. We’d moved to a campsite within 500 metres of the town.

It looked like Larache had been a fortified port – a port within the castle walls. The heads might have been too wide to drop a portcullis, but a heavy net might have worked just fine. This had probably been a stronghold for pirates to attack ships entering and leaving the Mediterranean. Now the fort had been reduced to a ruin, but Mustafa’s swarthiness and Mohammed’s practised imperviousness reminded me that the pirates still remained. In the water a few boats bobbed in a row, ready to take passengers into town on the far side of the port. Behind the town was a cluster of white and blue houses, climbing up the hill. Among the sugar-cubes of buildings, minarets and domes pierced the sky. The harbour was walled off from the town with colossal ancient stones. A few trawlers were roped to a little jetty that clung to the wall. From this bank, Larache looked pretty.

Off the jetty, a maze of routes, underpasses and alleyways ambled up the hill, familiar to me only in how easy it was to get lost. I thought of how all ancient Moroccan towns worked this way – a confusion of streets, a second line of defence should the fortifications fail. Aziz led the way. Up, around and under. Occasionally we were pressed to the walls by a passing motorbike. Wherever there was space, and often even when there wasn’t, there were stalls, with old men smoking kiffe in their long clay pipes and selling djellabas, carved doors, rope, plastic utensils and round loaves of bread…and eventually we were released from the compression of the alleys and into a central square, flanked by a grand arcade.

Around the periphery of the square, cafes served fresh mint tea and men puffed away on their pipes. The square was a crush of every kind of vendor. There were pulses, argan and cooking oils, baskets of olives of every hue, fish of every shape, vegetables of every colour, nuts, grains, couscous and loaves of handmade bread. There were piles of turmeric, pepper, ginger, paprika and other spices with pungent aromas, and there were also odd things – ceramics and gold-rimmed glasses, broken machinery, cassettes, weavings, lamps, knives and fabrics.

Anne took Aziz to help her buy some yoghurt, fish and veggies, while Chris and I headed to one of the tea stalls where we were served promptly with fresh mint tea. Men from other tables came and sat by us, offering us kiffe. At first I declined because I didn’t like to pollute my sacred herb with tobacco. But because Chris (who also never smoked tobacco) gleefully accepted, I joined in.

With smoke creeping through our grey cells, we promptly forgot why we were in Larache. But, sensing we had forgotten something, we ended our conversations with the generous Moroccans in the tea stall, paid our two-dirham bill and wandered out into the market again. We imagined we were being followed by even more scammers, but couldn’t be sure. Chris found this hilarious and laughed uproariously as we weaved through the market and through a tunnel, down a passage in order to shake off our imaginary pursuers. Suddenly before us was the ruin that overlooked the water.

We scrambled through a hole in the wall. On this side, most of the fortress was still intact. There were some old stone stairways that led up to the first and second terraces, which faced inwards to a huge courtyard. We could have climbed higher, to the last and third level, but the final staircase had rotted away.

The courtyard was full of rubbish. Playing cards swirled around in the wind. I picked a couple up. I thought of my diaries – one chucked into a bin somewhere in Madrid; the other, stolen in Texas. Those cards would have once been pasted in. But now that I was learning the tarot, these cards were beginning to develop meanings. I read the cards out aloud to Chris.

‘The Queen of Hearts. Anne…Where is she? Where are we? The Seven of Cups: the hash-smokers’ card…distraction…Shit, man…we forgot! Anne is with Aziz!’

Chris was running over the piles of rubbish toward the hole in the wall before I even put the cards in my pocket. I followed him out of the ruin. There, another swarthy scammer was waiting outside for us – we weren’t wrong that we were being pursued, we were only wrong in believing we could shake our followers off. He had a huge joint in his hand (bait) but all we heard as we whizzed past was, ‘Come, my good friends, zero zero…Quality…’

I followed Chris down an alleyway. It looked familiar, but that didn’t mean we weren’t utterly lost. Chris was panting. We scrambled around trying to find the centre square. Eventually some kids led us back to the harbour. Hermann was there, taking photos.

‘It was a hospital,’ he said, gesturing to the ruin. ‘Then it was destroyed by the Spanish boats off the shore.’

We told him that we had lost Anne in the market and asked him the way back. So he instructed the children (in beginner’s Arabic) to bring us back to the market.

The market was just as busy as it had been earlier. We had no idea how long we’d been gone. It didn’t take long to find Anne and Aziz. Anne hadn’t been sold into slavery or married off as we’d feared. In fact there she was sitting in a cafe enjoying some mint tea and some kiffe herself. She had a couple of bags. She had finished her shopping and so Aziz led us back to the jetty and back to camp.

As predicted, our camp on the beach outside of Larache proved to be a very bad idea. All of our Moroccan ‘friends’ hung around now for twenty-four hours a day, and the girls got no suntans because the rain hardly paused.

I knew I had to do something, I had to act, but the hashish had made me a powerless puppet. The golden incense had all been smoked, and now I was just taking any shit that passed by. Halfway through a joint, I put it out and flicked it into the dunes. I decided to give up smoking hash for now. I needed a clear head for the journey ahead. Plus, there was just too much of it around and it wasn’t enjoyable anymore. Chris scored a few grams of grass because he was getting sick of hash too. Mohammed helped him make this deal but really wanted Chris to buy forty kilos of the stuff. He said that he could get the engineer to fit it into Bebe’s panels and then we could drive it to ‘France, Australia, America – anywhere.’ I told him that we had neither the courage nor the money and that we had no intention of travelling in any of those directions anyway, but south into Mauritania or east into Algeria, where his hash would be even more worthless. Mohammed thought that we were crazy for not accepting this deal and even crazier for wanting to go to those nowhere lands. ‘Wat you wanting Sahara for? Here is Sahara. Here is sand,’ he said pointing to the sodden dunes behind us. Ahmed and Mustafa rolled around in laughter.

I continued painting tarot cards. The Devil, being tied down; Temperance, what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger; The Moon, the unknown. Abby started painting some too. Ruth had found a book in town, and now she filled her time reading Midnight’s Children. Chris, Mishka and Anne were happy with idle talk. Lots of stories about Bilbo Baggins and Gollum and Mordor. Stories about cthulhu and the Great Conspiracy.

Eventually our entourage made their first theft. Aziz had stolen some money and a pocket-knife from Chris. The moment that Chris realised, Aziz disappeared with his booty. Needless to say, the other Moroccans did nothing to help us find Aziz. The decision was made to move on, to somewhere more secluded. I still hadn’t actually seen the beach, and work on Bebe was slow – possibly even deliberately delayed by our new ‘friends.’

I wanted to go back to where we were before, mostly because the Moroccans hated the idea. But the weather had really deteriorated, and with only one car and no working tent, we really needed shelter. So when Mohammed and Ahmed suggested that we move to a hut they knew, a few kilometres out of town, we had no choice but to play into their hands once again.

Our new abode was a tiny white cuboid, silhouetted by the grey sky and overlooking a bluff that led down to the silvery sea. By the time I arrived (we came in over three trips), everyone was waiting outside on the concrete landing, surrounded by stuff, beaming. It seemed their optimism was renewed, and I too had to admit that it was an improvement, after the mud and tension of the last camp.

The building had two rooms. One was padlocked, and we guessed it must be storing sand-mining equipment or fuel for the bulldozer that sat idle by the hut. The other door was open, and inside the room was big and empty. The only things that resembled furniture were a few grass mats (ours) and Chris’s skateboard, upon which Ahmed sat with a paper bag of marijuana buds.

It was still raining, but instead of mud and sodden dunes we were surrounded by green ground cover. And walking in it, every step revealed pungent aromas of aromatic herbs – of thyme, sweet marjoram, liquorice aromas and several kinds of mint. Down the hill was a small stream with running cold fresh water.

When dinner was prepared, another stranger turned up – goodness knows from where. A gruff and leathery man who didn’t appear to speak or understand a single word in any European language. He didn’t even flicker when his (supposed) name was spoken. The man ignored us completely and we soon forgot what his name was anyway. All he did was sit and cut dope from Ahmed’s bag, which pissed off Chris and Anne intensely because it turned out that it was theirs. Whenever Chris approached him, he’d just lift his knife threateningly. It was Chris who named the man Mull-O’Matic, and the name stuck. The man couldn’t be stopped from mixing tobacco into the mull, making it worthless to anybody but the three Moroccans.

After dinner, Mohammed took the rest of Chris’s two ounces (save a little which Chris had managed to ferret away) and divided it into two piles.

‘With this,’ he announced, holding up the smaller pile, ‘we teach you how we make hash. With this one,’ he swapped piles, ‘we make green cookie!’

One of the cassettes we had with us was The Wall by Pink Floyd, and it was playing when all of us (save Mishka) tucked into the cookie – a pale green, custard-like fudge that Mohammed cooked up. I’d given up smoking, but I still wanted to try eating the stuff. The other lesson failed. Mohammed’s attempt to make hashish in the traditional way produced nothing. Perhaps we needed several kilos of heads to make an amount of hash possible to detect, or perhaps Mohammed’s technique wasn’t traditional at all.

It was under the harsh light of our gas-lamp that we sat, waiting for the green, fudge-like cookie to come on. I started to do finger shadow puppets on the wall. Then Chris joined in. Our display was dull – a dog, a rabbit, a butterfly. Then Mishka had a go. His long fingers moved to animate the music. A flower, a face. Sex. His fingers followed the music in a vivid narrative, the shadowy forms transforming, morphing. Transfixing. The cookie was surging through my veins. I stole a second from the show to look around. It was coming on for everybody, except of course Mishka and Mull-O’Matic – neither of whom had tried the fudge. But, unlike Mull-O’Matic, who only ever changed his expression if his dope supply was threatened, Mishka was somehow also high. He was radiant, his hands were on their own with an independent life current. They shivered and Mishka became brighter. The music slowed and ended. Everyone clapped.

‘I wonder what the weather is like outside,’ somebody said.

‘Yeah I can just about see outside through the door,’ someone else replied.

‘Tell me if it’s raining outside. I think it would be cool to go outside for a walk.’

‘No. As far as I can see it’s clear outside.’

With the repetition of the word ‘outside,’ I began to feel the psychedelic pull of feedback. A flashback to my trip in New Orleans.

‘Can everyone feel it? Everyone keeps saying “outside”. I want to go outside. But I don’t want to say “outside”, nor do I want to hear the word “outside”. Stop saying “outside”! Then we can go outside.’ I panicked, and Anne and Mohammed seemed to have caught on.

‘Outside it much dark,’ said Mohammed.

‘Yes. I want to go outside too,’ added Anne.

‘Lets go outside,’ continued Abby.

‘I’m going outside,’ I said, desperate to get out of the loop.

Outside and in the darkness, I stood still. Inside I could still hear panicky jabber about ‘outside,’ but somehow the scratchedrecord effect seemed broken by the silence of the earth, the drizzle, the pungent aromas of herbs and the crashing of the surf. I was still feeling rattled, and I was still tripping intensely, but I was somehow secure. Mishka emerged with Abby and Anne. He headed toward me. He was iridescent in the darkness.

‘What’s wrong, Jan?’ he asked.

‘I’m tripping hard. Everyone keeps repeating “outside”. It’s a loop. It’s hell.’

Mishka took my hand and said, ‘I didn’t have any dope. I’m pure. Take my hand, I’ll be a pillar against it. Everything’s okay.’ His words were a balm to my rattled nerves.

I saw Chris step outside. The word was still being repeated, but it didn’t worry me anymore.

‘What is in here?’ he asked Ahmed, who was following him. Chris was gesturing to the locked door.

As an answer Ahmed called out in Arabic, and for the first time Mull-O’Matic got up. He pulled a bunch of keys from his djellaba and unlocked the steel door to the next room. The door slid heavily but easily open. Chris, Ahmed and Abby went in. Mishka and I followed. There was a clear plastic tent with the form of a cadaver vaguely visible underneath and Ahmed leaned over with his torch and lifted the plastic. He revealed a male corpse maybe about thirty years old, shrouded in simple white fabric. ‘What the fuck?’ Chris started to laugh inappropriately. ‘Shut up, Chris,’ I warned. Ahmed and the others were conspicuously silent, and I thought we’d best take our cues from them. The corpse surprised me. Not only because it was there, next door to us all this time, but because it was so dead. I’d never seen a corpse before. I thought I saw someone being killed in Portugal, but to see a body without life in it is something quite unexpected. It’s almost as if we can see life itself, and not just the outer forms it takes. Just as there’s no doubt that a defrosted chicken from a grocery store is dead, so human corpses have the same unmistakable vacancy.

Abby and I turned and left the room. Mishka and Chris had a longer inspection.

When they emerged, Ruth and Anne were with us. ‘Like, is that scary?’ asked Anne. She really wasn’t sure. It should have been, but whether it was, none of us really knew. It wasn’t like a dead body in a movie. It wasn’t ominous in any theatrical way – it wasn’t animated or in some gruesome pose. It lay out on a bier, as if it were waiting for delayed religious rites, not Satanic ones.

All of a sudden, everyone needed to debrief. We started to stroll down the path toward the beach, talking about the dead man next door. Mishka said that he could feel its presence. It wasn’t a disturbed soul.

‘Why is he not being buried?’ I asked. ‘Most cultures like to bury or burn their dead pretty quickly, not leave them around in a shed.’

‘I have no idea,’ Mishka answered. ‘Perhaps in Islam they need to leave the body for a week or so?’

‘I doubt it, most Islamic countries are hot and humid. Can you imagine a custom like that in the Gulf?’ I answered. ‘That body is being kept. Perhaps there’s been an industrial accident in the sand mine. Maybe there’s an inheritance complication. One thing’s for sure – it doesn’t look like murder. Murderers don’t treat their victims with enough respect to wrap them in white muslin.’

Mishka considered himself an authority on ghosts, demons and dead souls in general, and as we walked we talked about ghosts and the dead man.

The dunes and mining pits were all around us now, a dark and artificial landscape on an inhuman scale. The sky was black and the only light came from the phosphorescent sea. I was feeling conflicted. There I was, being given gifts fit for kings by a shepherd in Africa yet it was interfering with our passage to the spiritual heart of Africa. It was setting me off balance. I too wanted to be a pillar of purity, as Mishka had just been for me. Still, I believed that the herb was sacred, recommended by Focus, Bob Marley and the authors of the Bible. Even if it sometimes made my brain feel like rubber.

In that moment, I realised that for a while – perhaps a long while – I would have to renounce even the golden incense, myrrh-ijuana or whatever the shepherds gave to Jesus, in exchange for a greater gift. I had to journey into Africa as strong as Samson and as wise as the Judges. I needed the fortitude to look the Lion of Judah straight in the eyes and be a pillar myself – not only for people on bummer trips, but also in the face of a total meltdown of the cosmic order, should it ever happen. I’d need to be equipped to dismiss any fears, handle any adversity and embrace any challenges. And if I failed, I would’ve at least had the grace to die trying.

We stayed in the hut for another few days. Nobody saw the body again. It attracted no visitors, no family, no clergy, no police. Its only influence was to subdue our moods. The Moroccans didn’t want to talk about it either. When asked, Mohammed just nodded toward Mull-O’Matic and Ahmed and said, ‘Not to be talking of this.’ As if to suggest that the dead person, Ahmed and Mull-O’Matic might have all been related.

And so the body remained a mystery when Mishka and Ruth went into town and returned with Ruth hanging out the window blowing cat whistles and Bebe tooting joyously. It was time to move on. To head toward the Sahara and beyond, to Black Africa.

Over the past two weeks, we’d relaxed to the point that all our fears about the Moroccan scammers had been put aside. But with the arrival of Bebe, all our stuff started to disappear. Chris’s Walkman, his sunglasses. And as we packed, the stealing began in earnest. At one stage, I was putting things into the boot and Mishka was strapping things to one roof while Chris and Anne sorted the other car. Abby and Ruth were carrying things from the hut, when Abby reported things flying out the window. Inside Ahmed and Mohammed were looking delighted but guilty. Chris became furious at the loss of his Ray-Bans and wanted to beat up Ahmed. He had a point. Chris had blue eyes and would be going to the Sahara – he’d surely suffer without them.

Bebe and Claude pulled out from the little cemetery hut. I didn’t know how the others were going to get back to Larache, but they seemed happy to stay with Mull-O’Matic, to smoke and listen to the Walkman in peace. As we drove away, we could only hope that no ‘essentials’ had also been stolen.