Tafraout was full of black-eyed men; but none was the man I had ‘seen’ in my reveries. It had to be said, though, that the local Berbers were a handsome people, with strong facial bones, arresting faces and lithe frames. I watched them strolling around the town in their dusty robes, talking and smoking, laughing at each other’s jokes, sometimes holding hands.
‘They do that a lot round here,’ Miles said, nodding in the direction of a pair of elderly gentlemen in hooded robes and the region’s distinctive yellow leather slippers walking by hand in hand.
‘Aye, we were a bit worried when we first come here,’ Jez added. ‘Thought they were all arse bandits or something.’
Eve burst out laughing. ‘Very enlightened of you. Anyway, I think it’s rather sweet. It’s good that men show their feelings, that they can be affectionate towards their friends and family in public. I think the world would be a much nicer place if everyone could walk around holding hands.’
Jez looked towards Miles and raised an eyebrow. ‘Fancy a stroll?’
‘Don’t mind if I do.’
Off they went down the road, hand in hand, hamming it up for their audience. The locals looked on, puzzled at first; then they began to grin broadly. A couple of boys in Manchester United shirts who had been kicking a ball around in the road outside the café where we were drinking coffee and reading our guidebooks pointed and laughed, then followed them down the street, aping their gait with uncanny accuracy.
‘Not sure who’s won the mickey-taking contest,’ I said to Eve, but I was glad no one had taken offence at Jez and Miles’s horsing around.
My first impressions of the town were those of pleasant surprise. I didn’t know what I had been expecting of the place in which we would be staying, for all the photos I had seen had been of the outlying area and of the climbs. Maybe a crumbling adobe village like those we had seen beneath the Lion’s Head, quaint and otherworldly. Most of what we had seen of Tafraout was modern: a sprawl of low-rise buildings lined the main street in from the valley with ground floors given up to little businesses – lock-up shops and cafés, three mosques and a kasbah-style hotel on a hill. We arrived just as the sun was going down and there were not many women around. ‘They’re probably all inside cooking for their menfolk like good little housewives,’ Eve said, but I wasn’t so sure. The few I had seen so far had been working in the fields, or coming home from them, wrapped head to toe in the traditional black robes of the area, the fabric draped to display as much of the intricately embroidered hems as possible. They wore red leather slippers on their feet and shuffled along under back-breaking loads of greenery that must surely be fodder for their animals. Husbanding livestock in such a region would be demanding and difficult. The only vegetation I’d seen on the way up from the valley had been cacti, palm trees in a dried-up riverbed and some gnarled-looking trees I didn’t recognize but that were dotted about the orangey-red landscape at such regular and widely spaced intervals that I could imagine the complex root systems marking each tree’s territory beneath the surface, snaking out in all directions in a desperate search for water. For all the modern trappings of the place – the pharmacies, cars and satellite dishes – this was clearly a region bordering on desert, rocky, dry and dusty; it would be hard to make a living here. I’d read in the guidebook that most of the men of the area worked away from home for much of the year in cities across Morocco, bringing their Berber values of shrewdness, determination and a strong work-ethic to bear on thriving little businesses in Casablanca and Marrakech, and sending money home to sustain their families. The lion we had seen presiding over the valley was said to watch over their women, children and old folk while they were away, and indeed I’d noticed that the majority of the men we had seen here had been elderly, or young lads. Women in such a community would have to be pretty tough and self-reliant.
I watched a pair of them now coming up the road carrying a huge basket of vegetables from the market by one handle each. They stopped to exchange greetings with some men standing outside the bakery; one of the young men took the hand of the older woman and kissed it, then returned it to her and touched his hand to his heart. It was a gesture out of the fourteenth century, a touch of ancient chivalry. I found myself smiling broadly and was still doing so as the two women came towards us, chattering to one another. As they drew near, the older of the two paused in her conversation as if feeling my eyes upon her, then quickly drew her veil across her face with her free hand, covering her mouth and nose, and her friend immediately followed her example. They quickened their pace and walked past us, heads averted. I felt obscurely disappointed by this, marked out as a tourist, an intruder in their world. Which, of course, I was.
The men seemed to be doing a better job of cross-cultural bonding. Down the street, Jez and Miles had joined their mockers in a kick-around, and some of the older men had joined in too, shouting and laughing, running and tackling with a joyous enthusiasm rarely seen except in children.
‘Ah,’ said Eve. ‘Football: the universal language.’
We sat there companionably sipping our coffees and watching the world go by. Across the road a pair of cats – striped, tigery beasts with sharp yellow eyes and long limbs – lay in the shade of a barber’s shop awning and did the same. A metre away a large feral dog lay on her side with three puppies sucking at her teats. People coming out of the shop stepped carefully over them, even though I was sure I had read somewhere that Muslims disliked dogs, considering them unclean. It was all very laissez-faire: I could feel myself relaxing moment by moment, the little tightly wound Isabelle inside me uncoiling by fractions.
That night we ate at a restaurant Miles had discovered on his first visit, and found we were sharing the place with at least three other climbing teams. Some of us had already hit the hotel bar, since it was the only place in town with a licence to sell alcohol, and several were a bit the worse for wear. There was a lot of giggling and shouting as we stumbled in the darkness down a narrow alleyway bordered by old adobe houses. The doorway to the restaurant was lit by an ornate lantern and framed by hibiscus and bougainvillea. A huge, grinning sun had been painted in bright primary colours on the wall outside: a fitting symbol for the town and its attitude to life. Miles knocked on the door and moments later it was opened by a tall man in blue Berber robes and a red turban. His dark eyes glittered as he surveyed us – a dozen Western climbers in scruffy jeans and fleeces, breathing beer fumes out into the night air, the women with their hair unabashedly uncovered – and I wondered what he made of us, loud and dirty and irreverent: infidels all; but then he caught Jez and Miles in a huge embrace that somehow managed to encompass the whole group and swept us all inside.
‘My home, your home!’ he declared in heavily accented English, and we all trooped in, dutifully removed our boots and approach shoes, and sat where we were told, on tabourets and cushioned benches around a series of low circular tables. With candlelight flickering on the carved stucco-work and bright brocades, we feasted on spiced lentils and flatbreads, spectacular tajines of lamb and prunes with almonds, and a fragrant chicken couscous jewelled with bright vegetables and garnished with a scarlet sauce that made all of us gasp in awe and beg for the recipe.
The restaurateur tapped the side of his nose. ‘Is family secret,’ he told us. ‘It contains mixture of over twenty different spices. If I tell you how is made, you have no reason to come back here. The magic is lost. Mystery is very important in life, no?’
And with that, he swept our empty dishes away and strode back into the kitchen with a swirl of his blue robe.
Eve and I raised eyebrows at one another. ‘He’s quite something, isn’t he?’
‘Very striking,’ I agreed, thoughtful. There was something self-contained, confident and easy about the manner of the people we’d encountered in the few short hours we’d been here, which was attractive to someone who was used to the cocky one-upmanship of London men, a competitiveness that masked a deep insecurity and distrust of others. ‘Don’t get too interested,’ Jez said, eyeing us with amusement as we craned our necks to get a glimpse into the kitchen. ‘Someone got there first. We met his wife last year.’
Talk turned inevitably to climbing and plans for the next day. It was a mixed group – in age, ability and ambition. Three other women, one of them grey-haired and in her fifties, the other two (Jess and Helen) younger and flaunting rather more flesh than was wise, and five men other than Jez and Miles: two middle-aged guys and three young hotshots who boasted about the new routes they were here to bag. ‘Acres of unclimbed rock,’ the blond one was saying, ‘dozens of routes just waiting to be taken.’ He spoke as if he were in the vanguard of a conquering army about to ravish the virgins of the city.
Helen now leant across and batted her eyelashes at Jez. ‘It all sounds a bit hard round here. The climbing, I mean. Jess and I were wondering if you and Miles’d be up for taking us out with you tomorrow, since you’ve been here before, as guides, like. Give us a bit of an introduction to the rock?’ She admitted they’d never climbed outdoors before.
Miles’s face was the very picture of horror, but Jez was kinder. ‘Sorry, girls, love to, but we’re taking Eve and Iz out with us tomorrow. You should try bouldering on the granite; there’re even a couple of bolted routes you could have a go at – technically difficult but not dangerous.’
Helen shot me a look of pure female jealousy, hard and witchy. I gave a little shrug – not my battle, honey – but Eve was loving every moment of it. ‘Yes, we’re going to do the Lion’s Face,’ she said, putting her hand territorially on Jez’s thigh, and I watched his face go very still as he tried not to betray a reaction.
Someone took pity on the girls: an older man with a pale, lugubrious face and glasses who was here with his wife – the woman with short grey hair – and brother-in-law. ‘We’re climbing just above Oumsnat tomorrow,’ he said to Helen. ‘There’s a single pitch wall there with lots of good introductory routes on it – you can come with us.’
I could see that Helen was not going to give up without a fight, but luckily our conversation was interrupted by the restaurant manager coming back with a large tray bearing a silver teapot and a dozen glasses. He was followed by a blonde woman in a Moroccan tunic and jeans who surveyed us all and grinned, enjoying our surprise at seeing a European emerge from a Berber kitchen rather than one of the ubiquitous black-robed ladies. He poured out the mint tea from a ridiculous height with great élan so that it formed a frothing foam in the little decorated glasses that she passed amongst us along with some exquisite little almond biscuits. When she got to me, she stopped in her tracks and bent forward.
‘How lovely. Did you buy it here?’
I had forgotten I was wearing the amulet: the climbers were all far too interested in their sport to comment on it. I ran my fingers over it and it suddenly felt warm to the touch, as if it had taken in the warmth of the candles and the food and stored it in the red glass discs.
‘Ah, no. It was … a gift.’
‘Do you know anything about it?’
‘A little,’ I said cautiously.
‘I reckon it looks like a Moack,’ Jez grinned. ‘Don’t you, Miles?’
Miles made a face, uninterested. ‘Who climbs with Moacks nowadays? Bloody antiques.’
‘My dad gave me his: best runner I ever had,’ Jez said cheerfully.
The restaurateur’s wife grinned. ‘I doubt it was made in Sheffield,’ she said, astutely guessing his accent. ‘It looks as if it’s from the desert, or at least inspired by work from the desert tribes. Tafraout’s on the ancient trading route out of the Sahara towards Taroudant and the coast. There are a lot of southern influences in the jewellery made here.’
‘From the desert? Are you sure?’
She laughed. ‘Sorry, no, not really: I’m no expert. But you should ask around. Mhamid has similar necklaces at his stall in the souq. Houcine too. You could ask them if you want to find out more about it.’
Her husband appeared at her shoulder and fixed me with his glittering black eyes. ‘It is to Taïb you should talk. My cousin. He is expert in antiquities, he has business in Paris’ – Paree – ‘but he is in Tafraout now, for vacances. I arrange meeting for you if you wish.’
‘No, no, thank you; it’s very kind, but no,’ I said, flustered, and he shrugged and continued pouring out the teas. I could feel people looking at me, could feel the weight of their gazes on me, weighing me down; weighing upon the necklace. I swallowed fast, closed my eyes. Panic rose up like a black wave, worse than anything I’d felt on any climb I’d ever attempted; worse than the time I’d been halfway up Bubble Memory, stranded amid decayed limestone and flaky holds, and my only apparently good runner had popped out. I felt hot, then cold, and my heart hammered and hammered. Bile rose in my throat. I swallowed it down and forced myself to breathe steadily. Get back in the box, I told the panic fiercely. Back into the place in the back of my head where I stashed the things that mustn’t get out. I enfolded the amulet in my hand and felt it beat with my own pulse, slower and slower. When I opened my eyes, I found that actually no one was looking at me at all, not even Eve. Especially not Eve: she was hanging on Jez’s every word, her whole body angled towards him, mouth open and her eyes shining with such fervour that I had to look away. It was as if I’d walked in on them naked and sweating. I felt obscurely ashamed and appalled, as if I were in some way responsible for her. I tucked the amulet away beneath my jumper and tried hard to concentrate on getting back into the flow of the conversation.
That night I slept badly, woken at various times by the mournful cries of the feral dogs and the pre-dawn call to prayer. I lay there in my narrow single bed and listened to Eve’s steady breathing on the other side of the room. The tatters of a dream flickered and tantalized on the edge of consciousness, but no matter how hard I tried to go back to it somehow it evaded me, leaving me with a sense of unfocused dread, as if something awful had happened just out of my sight, something that had a bearing on my fate: a warning or a premonition.