A woman goes by carrying an earthenware jug on her back, followed by a small boy, dragging his heels and crying. His mother is not more than eighteen years of age, her movements full of both grace and weight.

Flatter country now, where all the animals are spancelled. In a reed-fenced yard, ducks, geese, turkeys. The yard gate is a rusty car door that was once blue.

Near the dammed lake, with its windsurfers, its weekend buses and cars, is a mysterious place that draws an even bigger crowd, a more loyal clientele: Aïn Bri Bri. A spring on the side of the road has been captured and a tap dribbles into a trough. People are drinking, others industriously filling plastic bottles to take home. Some are washing their cars. The traffic has piled up, cars parked hither and thither along a good stretch of road. The attraction? The water of Aïn Bri Bri keeps one safe from accidents.

Near Rabat, two policemen sit in a jeep reading the newspaper. At the junction with the airport, a policeman with a two-way radio in his hand stares sullenly at a man pushing a large two-wheeled cart along the road past him. A woman swathed in scarves and shawls marches home determinedly, carrying two heavily loaded baskets. Her face looks all of eighty-nine years, but her figure and gait put her at perhaps thirty-five.

He was in his thirties, impeccably dressed in an expensive suit, with expensive accessories: watch, brief case, shoes, tie pin, glasses. He had spent twelve years in London, working. ”Why London?” the passenger beside him wanted to know. “A mistake,” he replied sadly.

He was in his early thirties, young and cheerful, a glass of wine in his hand. It was difficult to decide if he was leg-pulling or not, when he said, “I wouldn’t go to Morocco now, I’d be afraid of catching AIDS from bedbugs.”

She was somebody’s grandmother, and she lived in Reims, the champagne district of northern France. She told the visitors about the time she had lived in Taza, during the time of the French Protectorate, and about the respect that was shown towards herself and the other colonists: “They got off the footpath when we walked by,” she said, drawing up her stiff old body.

The old route through the mountains from Fez to the Sahara has become a major road: at the Tizi n Tahlremt pass, the rocks are painted: Varsovie 4527 kilometres. It is bitterly cold, but there is no snow yet. Buses stop here to look back across the Moulouya plain to the blue of the Middle Atlas with Bou Nasr and its surrounding peaks covered in snow. Or at Midelt, with its red sloping roofs — one of them a church, where boys sell crystals and schoolgirls wait for taxis on this first day of the school holidays. A camper, registered in Alsace, takes a break, its Moroccan driver picking zaater — thyme — to make a herbal tea that will cure all ills.

Ahead forests of thuya and young pines descend past a snow barrier, alfalfa grass to right and left, and into the yellow plain with its huge herds of sheep and goats, its flat yellow houses each with a tent alongside, and some straggling orchards.

Here, in a hollow in the mountains is Moulay al Cherif, with a new marabout, cafe, mosque. On a wall, an enlarged and framed letter from a doctor says that the hot springs here can help cure rheumatism, arthritis, constipation, and more. To the north, the top of the mountain was once a coral reef.

At the tunnel Foum Zaabel, known as the Legionnaire’s Tunnel in the time of the French, the mochazni on guard is going with a kettle for water to make tea. Now the river Ziz cuts deeply into the folds and thrusts of the High Atlas, creating spectacular gorges, until it reaches the dam where the high water mark is a long way above the water. Further on again, the river will disappear under the desert.