In the 1930s, Ahmed lived in French Morocco. He had no money and no job. What was worse, he hadn’t even a rifle, and therefore as a Riffian he couldn’t be considered a real man. One day Ahmed and his friend crossed the border into the Spanish zone and joined up in the Spanish army. They were given a rifle each and put into training. His friend took to it, but after two days Ahmed had had enough, so he took the rifle and walked across the border and home.

In the mid ’70s, a man was going home late one night. He had been visiting friends. It was a pitch black night in the mountains and he came upon someone he didn’t recognise. A misunderstanding ensued and an argument broke out which ended in a fight. One of the men was killed. Friends of both men came on the scene and sent for the gendarmes. The matter was discussed. A price was decided upon, which the survivor was glad to pay to the family of the dead man. The gendarmes went home, the affair settled. Everyone was happier than if the “killer” had been arrested and tried. The gendarmes, there to have the law respected, had merely played the role of igurramen, traditional mediators in such squabbles. And the law they had had respected was not the new one, but the old one.

The land was originally grazed by several tribes in the area. When the French came, such land was confiscated and given to the French settlers. One of the colonists who got this land was reputedly a very nasty character, who always carried a rifle. He stole pieces of land right and left, was friendly with the French authorities who turned a blind eye. The locals were unable to say or do anything.

After Independence in 1956, the settlers left and the French gave the land to the new Moroccan state, rather than back to its previous owners. The land became a state farm. Its guardian was a man with a sad unshaven face. Badly dressed and often complaining, he was usually seen fumbling at things in corners. With his wife and large family he lived in poverty, his horizons hopelessly blocked.

Then one day the farm was divided into parcels and either sold cheaply or actually given free to those who had been working the land. And the guardian was amongst the former.

Now, some years later he can be seen on his mule, poorly dressed but neat and clean, and always laughing. He works very hard and is very happy. One of his neighbours, whom he calls Schlafen — a word he picked up during the war — for his laziness, was given a farm of the same size and potential. But Schlafen went broke after two years.

“In Dar es souq we met a young man who was very thin and looked strangely old. He had worked for three years in the Jerrada coal mine, he said, where he developed silicosis and was fired. Now he was back home in his father’s house. His father was the sheikh. We were invited to dinner, and they killed a turkey rather than a chicken, in our honour.”

The river water was owned by one of the local tribes. Each part of the tribe had the right to so many days’ water, once a week or month, each family a certain number of hours, and so on, down to individuals.

The king’s farm was nearby and he, like the French colonists before him, had the right to his ration of water. One day, the manager of the king’s farm took more than he should. He began to take more and more water each time his turn came.

One day he was found dead, in a place far away.

The king’s farm was nearby and he, like the French colonists before him, had the right to his ration of water.

The next manager understood why the first had died, and said, “lf the locals are tough, I can be tough too.” And he continued to take extra water. He moved around with bodyguards to protect him. The jemaa of the tribe gave orders to have him beaten up. Orders were not to kill him, but to teach him a lesson. If there were bodyguards, the orders were to do the same to them.

This was done. The authorities reacted by putting all the jemaa members in prison. Negotiations ensued.

“It’s not the king,” said the jemaa, “It’s the manager, trying to show off to the king.”

They were released.

They then took some sheep, their ceremonial tents, and all that was necessary for a stay of several days, and went to the palace to see the king.

Here, they were given the runaround, but they stayed put in their tents behind the mechouar. After a few days, the king received three of them and told them not to be afraid. They had decided to make a clean breast of it anyway, so they told him all: the killing, the beatings, etc.

The king said, “Tomorrow, all will be in order.”

So the three men went back to the jemaa and told them it was over, that everything would be all right. And they prepared a huge celebration and killed the sheep and made a mechoui. In the evening, the king came and spent some time with them. And the following day they went home contented, and the manager behaved himself from then on.

“How to fool around with another man’s wife?” he asked. “Send for an old woman who will deliver your message. If the lady is agreeable she tells the old woman what she wishes to receive as a gift. You meet on the day of the souq, which provides an excuse for the lady to leave her house. The old woman helps facilitate the outing. If anyone notices your gift later, be it a dress, a scarf, a bracelet or a pair of babouches, she says it is a present from her mother.”

“Between Fez and Taounate the countryside was swaying with wheat and the silvery leaves of olive trees. We were puzzled by a house standing a little apart and finer than the others, with a cement roof and a compound full of flowers. It was the only house with flowers for their own sake, a rare sight. The women in the compound too were different: instead of the usual dresses and shawls they were wearing djellabahs, like city women.

“Then a young man came out of the house and told us he had a zawia in Tissa, a small place with a souq, an admininistrative centre; it wasn’t really a town. There he waited in his zawia, and people came to pray with him. He might indulge in a little magic, or act as advisor to people with problems. People brought him food as a form of payment for his services.

“This explained the house, the women in djellabahs, and above all, the flowers.”

High on a mountain is a village called Bab el Habs. This means “The Gate of the Prison.” The village is located beside two big rocks with a passage between them. In the time of the French Protectorate this pass was the border gate between Spanish and French zones. Often those who passed from one zone to the other went to prison.

Bab el Habs has some herds of goats, almond trees that are white with flowers in February, and trees heavy with figs in September. There are a few small gardens. Life is far from easy, but people have found ways around hunger. When winter is really bad they eat acorns, and dried figs, which they also feed to the animals. Sometimes the figs have fermented and both people and animals get a little tipsy, for want of anything else to eat. In the past, the villagers used to travel 50 or 60 kilometres by donkey down to the plain during harvest time. They would pass among the harvesters, taking advantage of the tradition which says a man will have luck if he shares his harvest with all those who pass.

Omar never enters the territory of the neighbouring tribe. His grandfather was killed by them, and Omar lives in mortal dread of the same thing happening to him.

There is an office in town where people go to look for work, or for news of jobs. People wait in corners or sit on the floor, despondent. The office staff talk to their friends and cronies, drink coffee and tea brought in from the cafe around the corner, on a tray with a pole and a hook up the middle for easy carrying. Occasionally the staff shoo the workless people away from the counter.

One day, a man in a djellabah was there, watching all. He kept his djellabah hood up, so no one saw his face. But the next day, the story goes, all the office staff were fired and the workless were given their jobs.

It was another hot day in the labyrinthine city of Fez, and the reed-covered streets were a cool blessing. The tourist couple dawdled in front of a shop that sold verses from the Koran sewn in gold thread and framed in golden frames. A man standing nearby moved closer, a look of curiosity on his face. “Well?” he asked. “Well,” they grinned. “Married?” he asked, in French. “Yes,” they seemed pleased about it. So was the man. “Children?” he seemed to have a reason for asking. “Yes,” they nodded. “Good,” he looked relieved. “Children cement a marriage,” he said, and walked away, nodding and smiling.

The Plage des Nations runs along the coast from Rabat to Mehdia, near Kenitra. Along here the Atlantic is turquoise, with powerful waves and when there’s a swell it batters the brown red cliffs. When the tide is out the long white beach, with one little creek after another, is ideal for sunbathing and picnicking, although quite dangerous for swimming. On the cliff summit, yellowy balding grass allows the red earth to show through. Above it all the blue-white sky and a hot sun brings up the damp from the sea.

An old man who lives nearby has arranged a dirt track and a car park for bathers, and even a cliff path down to the beach. Most of the work was done with a pick and shovel. He supervises bathers, and blows a whistle from his summit if he notices anyone going out too far.

Beneath his feet in the car park are hundreds of flints, large and small, well-made and rejects. Fossil mussels too can be picked out of the cliff, mussels stuck in the ancient sand of some prehistoric epoch. There are still men who pick mussels off the rocks below, and cook them in large blackened barrels over an open fire. Then they shell them and take them to town to sell beneath the high medina walls, leaving the shells in today’s sand, for the archaeologists of the future.

Coming along the wide riverbed — a particular stretch now dry and full of pebbles and often used as a road except in severe flood — they met four men carrying a fifth on a homemade stretcher of branches. He lay quietly, his face covered as if he were dead. He had broken his leg and they were bringing him to a taxi which would take him to town. The nearest taxi was a small Peugeot van, about 10 kilometres further on.

Her husband was a political prisoner, who divorced her in order that she be left in peace, and also to have a place to hide from surveillance from time to time, when he got out of prison. Finally he was released. He came to see her secretly, and they spent some time together.

When the police came later asking questions about him, she lied. “That guy,” she said bitterly, “He let me down. He divorced me. Never came to see me. I wouldn’t want to see him.” The police left.

A few days later, she was raped by five men. But she didn’t go to the police. They might have done it, she reasoned, in revenge for her lies. On the other hand, they might be innocent of the crime, in which case they would be helping her. Then she would find herself on the opposite side of the law from her husband. And she didn’t want that either.

“Tourists!” he spat. “They think Moroccans are poor. They give money to beggars. They’re the ones who are poor, coming here with a couple of hundred pounds.”

A woman was gathering a sort of wild lettuce, to make salad, when she met a smallish man wearing a djellabah with the hood up. “What are you doing?” he asked. She explained that she had handed over her last few dirhams to her landlord. It was payment for the jobs he had promised to get for her two sons. Since then he had done nothing. She was desperate. She had no money left to buy food. “What about the king?” the man asked, “did you ever think of asking him?” “A liar and a Jew,” replied the woman. The man nodded thoughtfully and went away. The next, day a car arrived for her sons, and took them off to jobs in the police force. The woman was given an apartment in town. She does not know who was responsible, but says she is sure that the man in the djellabah was the king himself.

A few years ago, a man was appointed sheikh in a lost corner of the country about three hours’ walk from a tarred road. And he kept an eye on all that happened locally.

One day he saw a man chopping wood in the forest. He went and informed the forestry people, although this was not part of his job as sheikh. A few days later he was beaten up by the man who had stolen the wood. So the sheikh went to the Qa’id, his local immediate boss, and complained. The Qa’id called the stealer of wood and asked, “Why did you beat up the sheikh?”

“I never beat up the sheikh,” said the man, “and I’ll prove it.”

So he went off and found twelve witnesses who swore on the Koran that he hadn’t beaten up any sheikh. And the sheikh was fired and the affair closed.

Fatima’s house is small, with a low tin roof and a bare cement floor. In the main room there are two banquettes and a low table in the centre covered with an embroidered cloth. Pride of place in the room is taken by a cupboard with a glass door, which contains a patterned cup and saucer made in China, two bowls and a few glasses that don’t match each other. They are never used, never resorted to even in moments of high entertaining. She is happy just to look at them.

”Will you take a gander at that,” he said, flicking the pages of a Vogue magazine which showed Yves Saint Laurent’s apartment, crammed with objets d’art.

“A veritable museum,” he said.

The other looked, and wondered if there were any difference between Yves St. Laurent’s and Fatima’s little museum of treasures.

A boy shepherd was idling and had allowed all the sheep and goats to stray into a field of young beans. Only the donkey was content outside the area, eating a thistle. The boy’s father came on the scene and, wanting to chastise the boy, threw a stone at him. He meant to miss the boy, meant it as a warning to him. But the stone killed his son.

A girl was pregnant. She shouldn’t have been. “Semen left over from the men’s day at the hammam,” her family said.

“In the early ’70s at Taourirt in the Eastern Rif, we met a young man we knew. We had seen him already in his village somewhere on the mountains about 10 kilometres away. He had left home with twenty dirhams, he said, to look for work. Now he had only ten dirhams left, and would have to beg in the souq for the money to reach home. Or maybe he ended up in the coal mine at Jerrada…”

An emigrant to France sent money regularly to his brother at home, telling him to buy this and that, a cow, a sheep, a field, three olive trees, or to fix the roof of the house.

The money order came to the post office, near the souq. On each souq day, the mqaddem would drop into the post office and collect any letters for the people of his douar. Then he would go to the Qa’id’s house for his weekly meeting. When the mqaddem arrived back in the douar, he passed the money order on to the brother. The brother would then go to the post office himself to cash the money order. Upon receiving the money, he would give a tip to the man at the post office. Sometimes in winter, with the rivers in flood, this trip would take several days. And each time he got the money in his hands, the brother would celebrate, always finishing up at Moulay Yacoub, a hot water spring and baths about twenty kilometres from Fez. This was where the prostitutes of Fez were to be found.

Some years later, the emigrant finally came home on holidays from France. Instead of the prosperous farm he imagined, he found the same little place; the roof had not been mended for ten years, which hadn’t mattered during the years of drought, but that year there had been rain, and the roof had leaked badly. There were no olive trees, just a few skinny sheep and a few stalks of maize. Only the aloes and the prickly pear surrounding the compound flourished. The emigrant stayed the allotted time, and said nothing. Then he went away and never came back or sent money, ever again.

A widow woman became pregnant, three years after her husband had died. “The baby was asleep in the womb for three years,” she explained.

Just before Moroccan Independence, some geologists were working near the border between the Spanish and French zones. According to regulations, they checked in with the local French officer for local affairs and asked if that was all right with him.

“No problem at all,” he said, “It’s quiet here, go right ahead you won’t run into any trouble.”

He gave them a dozen mochazni just in case and they went off to do a couple of weeks’ field work, camping each night.

Then Independence was declared, and there were no field missions for some time.

Two years later, field trips began again: and the same geologists found themselves in the same area. Local administration had changed and now they had to check in with the local Qa’id, as regulations demanded. He welcomed them and asked lots of questions about their work.

“I remember you well,” he said finally, “You were up in ____ two years ago. You camped at night, you had some mochazni with you.”

They agreed this was so. The Qa’id explained that he had led one of the groups that were fighting for independence in the region.

“Do you know something?” said the new Qa’id, “We spent days deciding whether we’d kill you all or not.”

“But how can they control a crowd or keep order — they haven’t even got a baton, let alone a gun,” she said.

“Even when they have a gun, it may not be loaded.” He laughed. “Ah, but you’ve never seen them in action! Did you not see one man put the crowd in a line at the opening of the cinema last year, or keep children from under the horses’ hooves at the fantasia in honour of the Fête du Trône?” She shook her head.

“One man can do it, alone: one mochazni in a uniform. He just whips off his belt and goes to work. Pure magic, a mochazni with his belt off.” He smiled.

It was Ramadan. It was summer Ramadan. It was lunchtime. Saïd worked in a garage with four other men; they worked hard changing and repairing stubborn truck and tractor wheels with sometimes just a crowbar and brute strength. Even their shoes were not strong enough to protect their feet. Saïd wore short rubber boots really made for sloshing around in the countryside in the muck of winter. One boot had a split up the side, and when they got to the trickiest bit of levering a truck tire off its metal wheel, he had to be careful.

When they stopped work, Saïd took his coat from a hanger on the garage wall and went around the back of the garage. The others would be snoozing indoors for the break, they wouldn’t be eating or drinking anyway, and besides, the Ramadan night life left them exhausted during the day.

When he got outside, Saïd looked around him and put his hand in the pocket of his jacket. He brought out a triangular carton of milk. Tearing off a corner of the carton, he put it to his head and drank deeply. Milk was a good idea, he reflected, because it eased both thirst and hunger in one go. He didn’t mind that it had gone sour.

Suddenly he heard footsteps. One of his coworkers had come around the back and was looking at Saïd in horror. Saïd did not attempt to hide the now empty carton. A half litre of milk. It wasn’t much anyway.

“You should be ashamed of yourself!” the other exploded.

Then for a moment he was speechless, but soon he found the words, words he had heard, words he had read or even some that he felt, about fasting for Ramadan. He mentioned informing the police. Saïd knew he wouldn’t, but it was at that point that he lost his temper. He lashed out with his fist and knocked the other man out cold. Then he went back to changing tires.

He was a Superqa’id, and it was a lonely life for a man with a bit of education and city habits, way out there in the mountains. So he brought what he could from the city to pass the time, videos of belly dancers that played in the otherwise bare room, and when visitors came — even foreigners — he entertained them thus, while his wife and daughters looked the other way as they served the tea, or sat with their backs to the screen, listening to the idle chatter of the men, or giggling among themselves.

He had a round, happy face, and had joined the army, he said, because he couldn’t find any another job. He had been driven here by the colonel, who opened the large metal gate and showed him around the garden with its fruit trees and rows of vegetables. There was a little house at the bottom of the garden where he could live, the colonel said.

Now he tended the colonel’s fruit trees, watered the colonel’s vegetables daily with a pipe and a system of canals that he organised with a mattock. Even the colonel’s banana trees looked as if they might produce a crop of small bananas this year. The colonel was pleased, he said, and the colonel’s wife came each week to collect her stock of aubergines, peppers, tomatoes. In winter she would sell most of the crop of oranges and clementines for a profit.

He didn’t mind living out here away from the city, he didn’t even miss life at the barracks or his fellow soldiers. He didn’t mind gardening either. It was okay. He had learned a lot. It was a lot better than being in the war down in the Sahara, he said.

It is Friday, sunset. Each muezzin is chanting Allah el-Akbar from his minaret. Many have loudspeakers or electrical systems to augment the sound. Not many have the beautiful voices of the Egyptian chanting the same thing simultaneously on TV. Later there will be a film, followed by an orchestra playing Andalou music. In between, if parliament is in session, viewers may be treated to an hour of unscheduled political speeches.

There are no flat surfaces in this part of the Rif: steep mountains climb all around, up to 4,500 feet, black or yellow and red fleisches and schists with, miraculously, every six yards or so, a fig tree clinging for dear life. These are small hardy fig trees, and just before the harvest is ready in the valleys, the dried figs come into their own. When there is nothing left to eat, both men and animals live on dried figs from last year. Some of the figs have fermented by this time, and both animals and men are slightly drunk and argumentative. Down in the valley, people say that the people up here are crazy.

A butcher had a very beautiful daughter. One day the king passed the butcher’s house and caught a glimpse of the daughter. Later that day a car from the palace was seen in the vicinity, and the girl was never seen again.

“She is in the harim at the palace,” people say.

“Do you know what Morocco means in Saudi Arabia?” he asked, with a bitter smile. “The rich buy plane tickets so they can come here and find a woman for a few days, drink and dance and be merry. Then they go home as chaste as you like. And the poor? They just gaze at the Moroccan embassy over there in Saudi, with longing.”

Larbi was a gardener and caretaker and lived and worked in and around his boss’s garage, sleeping on an old sofa, washing at the deep cement sink where the maid washed clothes during the day. He earned about 100 dirhams a month.

He had paid about 2,500 dirhams to his uncle for Latifa, his cousin. He was very happy about it, and had told all his friends and acquaintances around his boss’s house. He wanted to have lots of children, he told his boss. He asked for leave to go home and get married. It would take a week or two to organise things, because he hadn’t been home for a year. Once married he would bring Latifa back to Rabat and try to find new lodgings for them both. His life would change a lot.

So he took a taxi into town, waited at the station for the bus, and began the long journey south.

Once married he would bring Latifa back to Rabat and try to find new lodgings for them both. His life would change…

When he got to the souq nearest home, he stopped to buy a couple of sheep, a sack of flour, chickens, couscous, almonds, spices, tea and sugar, provisions for the long marriage celebrations. He did not wonder why no one had come to meet him in response to his telegram.

He was on the point of loading the protesting sheep aboard the little Honda van that doubled as a taxi, when he saw his uncle coming to him through the crowd.

“The marriage is off,” the uncle said brusquely. He was saying it for the second time before Larbi really heard him: “We got a better match for her.”

The uncle apologised. He didn’t mention the 2,500 dirhams and Larbi did not even think of them. Neither did he ask his uncle what he should now do with the bawling sheep or the cumbersome sacks that stood at his feet.

He just quietly got rid of them with the help of the taxi driver, and had himself driven back to town, where he slept on the ground until the bus came, furled up in the heavy wool djellabah that he had had made years before, before leaving the valley for the first time.

Once back in Rabat, he went back to living in the garage, and working at the flowers, and watering the lawn, as before. Sometimes he walks to the corner and chats with the men in the shops, about this and that.

It was post supper time, a Ramadan evening in summer. The taxi made its way with difficulty through the strollers, young people dressed to kill dawdled across the road, young women ogled openly. “Little better than whores,” muttered the taxi driver viciously, “Married men driving round trying to pick them up.” He indicated a Fiat 132 alongside, said “He has a wife and two kids,” and spat symbolically.

A man had a son of eighteen who was good for nothing and refused to work at school. So the man went to the fqih and told him the story. The fqih gave him an amulet in the shape of a book, with something inside it which the man took to be a verse of the Koran. “Tell him to put that around his neck,” the fqih said, “It’s fashionable for these young people to wear something around their necks. Everything will be all right. Above all don’t let him open it.”

From the next day on, the son became a model boy, he worked hard and began to do well at school. He even seemed to be happy. His father was amazed.

Six months went by like this. One day, the son left the amulet on the dresser, and the father decided to open it. Inside he found a forty centime postage stamp. The stamp, like most postage stamps in Morocco, bore the head of King Hassan II.

The new teacher refused to treat Fatima’s son as a special case, as the previous ones had done.

“He should be in a special school for handicapped children if he can neither see nor hear in my class.”

She was angry, and interpreted Fatima’s visit — made after much deliberation — as criticism. She called other teachers to witness her problems.

“You know how many pupils I have in one class?”, she asked, glaring into Fatima’s face.

The other teachers toed the ground of the yard with their shoes. She did not wait for an answer.

“I have forty-eight pupils. I can’t be expected to make sure that yours sees and hears everything.” Fatima must know, she went on, that she had two lots of pupils coming in shifts, as in schools all over the country, because there weren’t enough teachers, or places, or schools.

The others nodded wearily and shuffled off home.

She seemed to soften a little then and took Fatima by the arm, and walked her to the gate, saying, “But he works hard, and he doesn’t really need to see the blackboard — he copies it all from the boy beside him.”

The seating was old, the springs gone; in some rows that weren’t properly screwed to the floor, patrons had to be careful lest the entire row heave backwards and tip them up.

The cinema cost only two dirhams at the time, and as usual it was packed. The seating was old, the springs gone; in some rows that weren’t properly screwed to the floor, patrons had to be careful lest the entire row heave backwards and tip them up. This could sometimes be engineered by those behind if they were in the mood or the film was boring.

That evening, however, the film — a horror film — was riveting. The audience was so absorbed that it got quite a shock when suddenly a strange noise rang out, waning and banging. Everyone panicked and ran for the doors. Very soon the whole cinema was empty. Out on the street, the owner had quite a time getting it across to them that it was a vibrating water pipe in the toilets. Finally he offered them another film, free of charge, and they all came back in and settled down again.

“Cigarettes are bad for you,” the young man said to the tourist. “Now kif on the other hand is natural, contains no chemicals….”.

Behind them, on the whitewashed wall of the town spring, a mochazni sat filling his sebsi.

”You look like les Anglais,” the young man said.

The woman smiled a bit, but pretended to ignore him. Without waiting for a reply, he produced a Christmas card from Janet. “My English girlfriend,” he said.

The woman couldn’t resist reading it. The postscript ran, “The grass here is not as good as chez toi. Kisses.”

“France is not the same things as England,” said the young man, “Not the same things at all. France is Babylon.”

Out of the desert of the Moulouya plain, in trees and greenery, stands Taza, white and yellow and modern in the sunset. The “Moroccan Verdun,” it once controlled the pass against invaders from the east. There are still some old hotels with brass bedsteads and French names and with photos from the ’50s in the lobbies, of French potholers in nearby caves, wearing knee length shorts.

In a restaurant, a young prostitute sits chain smoking with a mochazni sergeant. She visits the toilet a lot, chivvying a young man who stares at her on her way back, running her fingers through his hair. She is bare-legged, dressed European style, wearing a knee length summer dress and a worn knitted cardigan. At another table, a young man rolls a cigarette full of hashish on his knees, and keeps a wary eye on the mochazni, who orders heavy harira soup. The girl refuses to eat.

At the top of the town, the Middle Atlas on one side and the Rif mountains on the other are just discernible in the dusk. Three boys play football: one wearing sneakers, another plastic football boots, and the third in babouches, which fly off each time he kicks the ball. Soon it will be too dark, and they will stroll home to a dinner of mostly bread, dipped in spicy sauce.

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.