Toy Desert
I just slept in a mud-brick house belonging to an isolated shepherd family on a desolate plain near the Algerian border. It was a beautiful place, and a privilege to meet such people. And I paid good money for the experience. That’s the part which makes me uneasy.
Thirty Euros, that’s what it costs to be a cultural voyeur these days. It’s a lot of money for rural Morocco, and a lot of money for me even – two days’ travel budget. I suppose most of it pays for the camels. These were the main attraction, the thing that all the touts at every hotel and café were selling: an overnight camel trek through the desert. Of course, nobody needs to ride a camel. Even in the caravans of old they were pack animals, not mounts. But I couldn’t resist living the cliché. And the camels – they were dromedaries, actually, with one hump each – the camels were extraordinary beasts, with their long shaggy necks and that strangely placid camel gaze. So I paid my money and got a camel trek across the sand dunes. That part of the transaction I was comfortable with.
The dunes are worth seeing with any mode of transportation. A great orange landscape of sand, burning in the sun as we three tourists bobbed slowly along on our mounts. I’d spent time in the dunes before, having stayed in Merzouga, the tiny town on the edge of the sand, for over two weeks. In fact I had played in that surreal landscape almost every day. But this trek was something else. We were going to cross the dunes.
Which we did in only three hours. Erg Chebbi, as this place is called, turns out to be only five kilometers wide. I could have walked. Maybe I should have. The 4×4s playing in the sand made a mockery of us as we clomped slowly across the orange landscape, and in the shadow of a great dune we passed a little faux-oasis, complete with palm trees and rough fabric tents for the tourists to sleep in. If I’d taken up with a different guide, we would have been sleeping there. The whole place began to feel like a toy desert. And so, as much as I love the dunes, I was relieved when we left the orange sand and spilled out onto the rocky plain beyond, the hamada. The stony desert there was perfectly flat, perfectly uniform. There was absolutely nothing in any direction: no hills, no trees, no people. It was a sensation as eerie, in its own way, as the towering majesty of the dunes.
No – the plain was not completely empty. As we bobbed onwards a cluster of black specks resolved themselves into five or six little mud houses. Not quite a village. More like a loose collection of families, hundreds of meters apart but still visibly together. These people were Berber nomads, our guide said, descendants of Morocco’s original inhabitants. It was to one of these homes that we headed, arriving at sunset and calling our greetings across the still plain.
Our host came out to greet us. His name is best transliterated as Ahmed, although there really isn’t an English equivalent for the emphatic H sound in his proper name. He wore a grungy turban and djellaba, a full-length robe with a pointed hood. He spoke no English, and little French, but the usual round of ritual greetings in mixed Arabic and French was clear enough. A handshake, and
Bonjour.
Bonjour.
La bas? Are you well?
La bas. I am well.
Hamdulla. Praise Allah, and then the right hand is touched to the heart. A variation of this is repeated for every person in the group. As I shook Ahmed’s hand, I couldn’t help thinking that he looked like a character from a storybook, only dirtier, and a few days earlier I might not have believed that anyone would actually dress that way. But no, about half the men in Merzouga wore such attire.
We sat outside on a mat of woven plastic to watch the winter sunset, a deadly silent explosion of reds and oranges over the burnt dunes. It was vivid, lurid, bloody and beautiful, and I was glad to be there. Magnificent doesn’t begin to describe it, but that story will have to wait for poetry.
As night fell, our host retreated to the house and returned shortly bearing a silver tray upon which was a teapot and four small glasses. He served the tea in the formal way, first pouring and then emptying three glasses back into the pot to mix the sugar. We drank tea with Ahmed in the cold wind on the empty plain, watching the sky. He brought out mandarin oranges for desert, and indicated that he would gladly brew as much tea as we wanted to drink while we sat outside. It was all terribly civilized, and I suddenly wondered how many thousands of evenings had been passed by these people in this way, drinking tea and watching the darkening sky.
His wife came out and introduced herself as Naïma, and chatted with us briefly. This was the first time any woman had ever introduced herself to me in a Moroccan home. Thus far the women had been all but invisible, perhaps introduced by their husband or father but never included socially and certainly never speaking for themselves. I watched her closely, trying to get a feel as best I could for her personality.
A little later, we were shown into a room in the house in preparation for dinner. Like the rest of the house it had walls of mud-brick, an ill-fitting sheet-metal door, and a low mud roof supported by reeds. The dirt floor was covered by more plastic mats, and there were a few dense pillows along the walls, for leaning against. In a mud alcove in the wall a single candle burned, the only source of light. Someone brought in a low wood table, the only real furniture I saw the entire time I was there.
I was excited to see inside the home. I’d never been in a mud house before, and was very curious as to how these people lived. But my curiosity would go unsatisfied: the room turned out to be a dead end, entirely disconnected from the family’s living space. I wanted badly to see the rest of the house, but the etiquette baffled me. Despite the almost obsequious politeness of our hosts, I doubted that I could simply step in through the front door. Instead I hovered, lingering outside the open main entranceway, catching what glimpses I could of the lives inside. Naïma squatted in the dirt before a large plastic bowl, mixing couscous and water with her hands. Several men were seated on low plastic stools against the walls, drinking tea. All were illuminated only by the firelight from the oven built into the mud wall. Candlelight spilled through an open interior doorway from what I presumed to be the bedroom. I saw a few personal artifacts scattered on the floor, and a dirty cotton garment hanging from a nail low on the wall.
We ate in the isolated guest room by the light of a single candle, warm inside the dirt walls as the night picked up a chill. The meal, when it came, was simple but delicious. It was perfect food for the cold night, a steaming mound of yellow couscous on a large platter, covered in stewed vegetables that melted in your mouth, and hiding a single large chicken leg at the center. We all ate from the single platter, using spoons instead of the more usual right hand in deference to the foreign guests. There was more than enough food for all five: three tourists, their guide, and Ahmed. Despite our repeated inquiries, Naïma did not join us for the meal. We were not truly inside the home.
After dinner, we sat and talked and drank tea for some time. The conversation was mostly in French, which no one present truly spoke fluently. A flute was produced, simply a length of copper pipe with four holes drilled in it. Ahmed played a haunting but repetitive dirge on the makeshift instrument, repeating the four note scale in endless breathy variations. It was beautiful in its own way, a cold and desolate melody, but appeared to be the only song he knew. Other times our guide pounded out a beat on the table and sang for us. They can drum in this country, I noticed again; even a cheerful amateur could still bang out a rhythm far better than any white kid I knew. This is a culture which has always had music, and you can find the scent of black Africa on the wind here.
Later, I left the guest room to watch the stars. That night the earth shone for me as well. I stood alone on a flat plain, seemingly endless, seemingly alone with the three-quarter moon for as far as the eye could see. I was just about the tallest thing in any direction, and it made me feel both very big and very small, lost in that vastness. There was nothing at all but desert and sky, and absolute silence. To the west the dunes glowed faintly, recognizably orange even by moonlight. To the east I could see the distant shadows of the mountains on the edge of the plain, marking the Algerian border. I suddenly felt a very long way from home.
This, I thought, this is why I travel. No matter how I got here, who I had to pay, however false or contrived the experience of reaching this point may have been, I am here. It was all worth it.
I stayed out for as long as I could stand the cold, then went to sleep.
There were animal sounds in the night. I heard lambs and chickens, and also a warbling trill which turned out to be the goats. Most of all I savored the strange guttural grunts and groans of the camels. Camels make amazing noises, low gurgling sounds that always sound offended. But mostly they just sat on the plain where our guide had tied them up, perfectly still through the freezing night.
In the morning, I awoke early. I was reassured to discover that the goats were gone early with Ahmed. So: these people really were shepherds. I had wondered, because tourism had to be far more profitable.
Our guide served us breakfast of bread and jam, but ate nothing himself. He said he wasn’t hungry, and I wondered how many meals he usually ate in a day. Naïma again joined us for a while. She didn’t eat, and didn’t talk much, but seemed content to sit with us. I noticed she was pregnant and asked about her children. She has three, ages 7, 13, and 17, and they live in the town of Risani thirty kilometers away. She herself is only 30, although she looks and moves like someone much older. She has lived in her little home her entire life. Later, we saw her repairing it, throwing freshly mixed mud at the walls in great handfuls, then smoothing it over with her palms.
It was time to go. We tourists gathered our belongings as our guide roused our mounts. We thanked Ahmed and Naïma profusely, then set off on our camels.
Just as we were leaving, another tourist arrived, complete with camel and guide.
And all my repressed doubts suddenly burst to the surface.
In a single moment of insight I saw how set the script had been. A once-in-a-lifetime encounter for me was simply another day’s work for these people. What had happened between us was not so much a cultural exchange as a business transaction. Riding slowly back across the dunes in the harsh light of day, I considered the whole experience. At first, I was strangely sad. I guess I had wanted to believe I am an explorer, a discoverer and chronicler of rare experiences, but there is nothing adventurous about what I did. I simply fell into the groove worn smooth by other tourists, the fastest and most gracious way to separate the foreigners from their money. I saw some strange and wondrous things, to be sure; I’d never been a guest in a shepherd’s mud house before. Perhaps more accurately, I could say that I was a guest in a mud hotel. As long as I think of it that way, the experience makes more sense to me. Like a hotel, the package tour I took exists solely due to the economics of tourism. I’ve stumbled across true invitations before, like the time I got drunk on rice wine with some Vietnamese farmers in their mountain shack. Those guys just wanted to hang out with someone new and different. Ahmed and Naïma had other motives.
It also made me squeamish to think that I might have been enjoying some sort of tourism of poverty, but I don’t actually know whether Ahmed and Naïma see themselves as destitute. They didn’t seem unhappy. They seemed tired but contented, and despite the squalor their house was clearly a home, cozy and lived-in. I wonder if they have good access to clean water, and what they do when someone falls ill. Meditating atop my camel, I wondered what these people truly wanted. I wondered what, if anything, I could have done to help them get it. Perhaps I had already done all they could ask, because they got their money from me.
And in the end, what does it matter? Their way of life is vanishing due to advancing culture and simple economics. It is obvious to me that Ahmed and Naïma will be the last generation on that plain; it is obvious from the fact that their children all live in town, from the fact that tiny Merzouga’s three internet cafes are always packed solid with local kids in the evenings, and from the fact that there was a Land Rover parked at the next hovel over. So I am forced to admit that what I saw was nothing more than a vignette of a rapidly vanishing way of life. Like all disappearing cultural treasures, it can survive now only by transforming itself into theatre.
Fair enough. And however uneasy the whole experience makes me, I must say that I got my money’s worth. It was a privilege to look into these people’s lives, however shallowly, even if I am a generation too late to truly experience a culture that has existed for hundreds if not thousands of years. Now I must find a way to chase the present instead of the past, to find the cultural experiences which cannot be sold to tourists.
Oh, and there was a five Euro late fee for returning the camels after noon.
