Glory in a Camel's Eye: Trekking Through the Moroccan Sahara - Hardcover

JEFFREY TAYLER is a correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly and a contributor to Condé Nast Traveler, Harper’s Magazine, and National Geographic. He is the author of many critically acclaimed books, including Facing the Congo, Angry Wind, and River of No Reprieve.

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Other Lives to Lead
The Road to the Drâa Valley

In 1986, while in graduate school writing a master"s thesis on famine in the
Soviet Ukraine, I discovered two books that pointed me toward
transformational peregrinations in the Arab world. The first was Wilfred
Thesiger"s Arabian Sands, the great British explorer"s account of his
postwar travels on foot and by camel with Bedouin tribesmen in the Empty
Quarter of the Arabian Peninsula. Though hired by the Middle East Anti-
Locust Unit to search out locust breeding grounds, Thesiger pursued a
personal quest while in Arabia, a quest intimately related to the nomads with
whom he lived: he hoped to "find the peace that comes with solitude, and
among the [Bedouin], comradeship in a hostile world." The spirit of the
Bedouin, he wrote, "lit the desert like a flame." Traversing much of Oman and
Saudi Arabia in their company, he at first felt like "an uncouth and inarticulate
barbarian, an intruder from a shoddy and materialistic world." So poor were
the Bedouin that they wore only smocks, loincloths, and daggers, yet they
never stole from him. Indeed, they proved themselves paragons of desert
virtue, and, during the five years he spent roaming the sands as their guest,
they became his closest friends. Thesiger emerged from the Empty Quarter
hardened by heat, hunger, thirst, and tribal raids, and forever after felt himself
a stranger in "civilized" company. He had, in sum, found what he was looking
for among the Bedouin, and it had transformed him.
When I read Sands, I was studying Arabic, having had an inkling
that adventure — another life, even — awaited me in the Arab world. Sands
introduced me to the Bedouin, who were masters of terrain in which one
needed stamina and courage to survive. I read and reread the book,
dreaming of journeys in the Empty Quarter, but Arabia had changed much
since Thesiger"s day, as he himself had written. In the 1970s he had revisited
his old haunts and found them an "Arabian nightmare" of oil money and
skyscrapers, of Bedouin who had abandoned their camels for Land Rovers.
Sands was really an elegy, a travelogue that would, he hoped, remain
a "memorial to a vanished past, a tribute to a once magnificent people."
Soon after finishing Sands, I came across the other book that
fired me with passion for the Arab world: Philip K. Hitti"s History of the Arabs.
Every word of History rang with the author"s love of Arab civilization, the
Islamic era of which began in the seventh century with the eruption of Arab
armies, largely composed of Bedouin tribesmen, out of Arabia. In the name
of Islam, the Arabs conquered all of North Africa; in Europe, they overran
Spain and reached France; in Asia, they made it to China. "Around the name
of the Arabs," Hitti wrote, "would gleam the halo that belongs to
world-conquerors." To the Bedouin, "the Arabian nation is the noblest of all
nations (afkhar alumam). The civilized man, from the Bedouin"s exalted point
of view, is less happy and far inferior. In the purity of his blood, his eloquence
and poetry, his sword and horse and above all his noble ancestry (nasab),
the Arabian takes infinite pride. . . . The phenomenal and almost unparalleled
efflorescence of early Islam was due in no small measure to the latent
powers of the Bedouins, who, in the words of the Caliph "Umar, "furnished
Islam with its raw material.""
From Hitti I learned that the Bedouin were not only the archetypal
wanderers, but also the co-originators of Islamic civilization, which was
once one of the most progressive civilizations on earth. From the eighth to
the thirteenth centuries, while Europe recovered from barbarian invasions and
suffered seignorialism and feudal rule, Córdoba of the Umayyad dynasty
and Baghdad of the Abbasids rivaled Constantinople in splendor. While
Western Europe was largely illiterate, the Arabs were conquering the Middle
Eastern and North African territories of Byzantium and absorbing Hellenic
culture; Arab caliphs were reading Aristotle; and Arab thinkers were
syncretizing Hellenic and Islamic philosophies and transmitting Greek
scholarship to Europe, thus eventually fostering the Renaissance. During the
Middle Ages Arabic became a language of science and literature and, by way
of Medieval Latin, contributed to English a wealth of now common words,
among them "alcohol," "algebra," "syrup," and "coffee." From the eastern
realms of their empire, the Arabs brought back Hindi ("Indian," later
called "Arabic") numerals and passed them on to Europe; the Indian concept
of zero permitted the birth of modern mathematics and science. The Arabs
kept alive the ancient Greek notion that the earth was round and, through a
work in Latin, delivered it to Columbus, thus aiding his discovery of the
Americas.
Hitti"s work taught me that the Arabs were the exponents of a
civilization that differed fundamentally from that of the West. Whereas in the
West commercialism and multitudinous creeds, religions, and philosophies
flourish and in their cacophony offer no single answer to our existential
quandaries, in most of the Arab world one religion, Islam (which translates
as "submission"— to the will of God), dominates all aspects of life,
demanding of its followers discipline, self-abnegation, and the observance of
ritual. In the concept of Umma, the Islamic Nation, are a refutal of Western
individualism and an antidote to loneliness and alienation. Moreover, and
this was crucial to me as a traveler, the cities that gave birth to this
civilization bore some of the most exotic and alluring names (Baghdad,
Marrakesh, Damascus) that I had ever heard.
After reading Hitti, I threw myself into the study of Arabic,
spending six hours every day learning grammar, listening to tapes, and
meeting with my Jordanian and Palestinian instructors. A year later, in
1987, I quit graduate school, flew to Portugal, and sailed from Algeciras in
southern Spain across the Strait of Gibraltar to Morocco, from where I
intended to make my way east across the entire Arab world, my destination
Baghdad.
This was a grand idea that owed more to rash enthusiasm than to
planning. A few days after arriving in Morocco, beneath the soaring minarets
and earthen ramparts of Meknès, I ate a bad kebab and it nearly killed me
with a fortnight of nausea, vomiting, dizzying headaches, and diarrhea. But
along with food poisoning I confronted other impediments. Darija, the Arabic
dialect of Morocco, proved almost completely unintelligible to me, bearing
little resemblance to the classical Arabic I had been studying. I thus found
myself able to recite chapters from A Thousand and One Nights while
having trouble understanding directions to the bathrooms I so often needed.
There were also faux guides who set upon Nasranis ("foreigners," or more
exactly, "Nazarenes," "Christians") in the streets. Day after day, as I
staggered out of my hotel to buy yogurt and Lomotil, I was accosted by
unemployed youths demanding I hire them as guides for tours of the
medina. Few took kindly to rejection. One youth whose services I declined
grew irate. "You won"t hire me! Then you"ll rot in a Moroccan prison!" He
turned to passersby and shouted, while pointing at me, "Drug dealer! Drug
dealer! This Nasrani"s trying to sell me drugs! Police! Police! Drug dealer!"
There were no police about, though, and I slipped back into my hotel, shaken
up and uncomprehending. More incidents like this followed.
Previous travels in Europe and Turkey had not prepared me for
Morocco. Still sick, I gave up and staggered aboard a plane in Casablanca,
bound first for Rome and then for familiar haunts in the eastern
Mediterranean. My plans for the Arab world would have to wait. I would have
to prepare myself better if ever again I attempted to tread in Thesiger"s
footsteps.
After seven months of rambling around Italy, Greece, and Turkey,
I ran out of money and returned to the States. I pursued my study of Arabic
at a language institute in Washington, D.C., and wondered what to do next.
Having no other ideas but wanting to return to an Arab country (any Arab
country but Morocco, that is), I applied to join the Peace Corps and was
called in for an interview. The Peace Corps occupied an old building in the
center of town. Fans chopped the air above desks cluttered with amulets
and native trinkets from West Africa and Central America; posters of smiling
African children and Bolivian peasants in colorful shawls hung on yellowed
walls. There was an earnestness about the besandaled employees there
that I found disagreeable.
The recruitment officer to whom I spoke was a perky young
woman in a frumpy dress. Scribbling and hunched over a mess of papers,
she asked me to explain why I wanted to be a volunteer. I sensed that I
needed an altruistic motive along the lines of Thesiger"s locust research to
win her over, so I said something about wanting to help people in developing
countries better their lives. This platitude elicited smiles and comments
about how my undergraduate degree in psychology (a discipline I had
renounced) would suit the Peace Corps just fine. She scribbled away.
"Sooo . . . is there any place you"d prefer to go?" "Since I speak
Arabic, I"d like to go to Yemen or Tunisia." I paused. "The only place I don"t
want to go is Morocco."
"Peace Corps is not a travel agency," she said, in a tone that
sounded like it portended my imminent disqualification. "You can"t choose
your country of service."
"Then why did you ask me where I wanted to go?"
"You can state your preference, that"s all. You should be ready to
serve in whatever country we offer you for the good of the people . . ."
A few weeks later she called me. "We have an opening."
"Where?"
"In Morocco."
"But . . . you have nothing else?"
She told me that Morocco was all they had available in an Arab
country at the time, and reminded me that if I turned her down I might lead
her to believe that I saw Peace Corps as a travel agency. I thought it over
for a few minutes. My money had run out, and I had no other prospects for
employment. I accepted her offer and was soon on a plane for Morocco.
After three months of instruction in Moroccan Arabic and culture
in Rabat, I was given a two-year assignment in Marrakesh, working with a
school for the blind and with the parents of handicapped children. Dating
from the eleventh century, Marrakesh is an imperial city of souks and snake
charmers and hash-scented alleys largely enclosed in earthen walls on a
burnt-out plain, beneath the snow-mantled peaks of the High Atlas. I took
up residence in the casbah (from the Arabic qasaba, or citadel) district, far
from other volunteers; I adopted an Arabic name, Jelal, because I found that
few Moroccans could remember my own. There were no Bedouin in the
casbah or elsewhere in Marrakesh, but there were many faux guides. Now
that I was a long-term guest in their country, I was compelled to reach a sort
of modus vivendi with them. I could not escape them, and they were, after all,
just poor youths in a country where there was little work. But I never allowed
them to intimidate me as they had the previous year. When necessary, I
adopted their blustering tactics and threatening postures and used them
against them. The only time I have ever hit anybody was while I was a Peace
Corps volunteer in Marrakesh.
In any case, I discovered a distraction that brought me closer to
Moroccan life than any job with the Peace Corps ever would: Moroccan
women. The first year I didn"t dare engage them; the second year I found I
couldn"t resist. They glided down Marrakesh"s alleys of dung-leavened dust,
their kohl-daubed eyes alert, their breasts swinging under the silk of flowing
djellabas, their hair glinting with the warm tints of henna. The prospect of
marrying a rich (to them) American made me attractive enough, as did the
chance to dabble in pleasures of the flesh with a forbidden Christian; they
knew that Nasranis would not despise them as whores for sleeping with
them.
This was new territory for me. During training, Peace Corps
instructors had warned female volunteers of the trauma they could expect to
suffer in adjusting to the second-class status Islamic society would impose
on them, but they said nothing to male volunteers about the magic
Moroccan women practiced to trap a mate (though they did warn us that irate
brothers and knife-wielding fathers made "dating" an exceedingly dangerous
business). The instructors said not a word about the evening paseo, during
which single men and women strolled the downtown avenues, arranging
trysts after exchanging little more than stares and smiles. They certainly
didn"t mention sbagha (painting), the practice whereby a Moroccan woman,
desirous of maintaining her virginity yet determined to get off with her lover,
vigorously "paints" her clitoris with the tip of his erect penis. Nor did they tell
us anything about the prevalence of prostitutes, often veiled, who worked
the crowds of big cities at dusk, searching for clients as the call to prayer
sounded. The word qahba (whore) was not even in the Peace Corps manual
of Moroccan Arabic, though it was one of the more frequently used words in
the language.
So I did my time in Marrakesh, conducting trysts, evading
brothers, reading Arabic literature, and yearning for even more adventure,
more escape, something along the lines of what Thesiger had described in
Arabian Sands. Then, at the very end of my tour, Iraq invaded Kuwait. Just
as I was preparing to travel to the Middle East to try to start a career in
photojournalism, another volunteer told me of a valley in Morocco"s remote
south called the Drâa. The Drâa was, he said, the desert wasteland from
which, in the sixteenth century, warriors of the Saadi dynasty had emerged
to halt the advances of the Portuguese and the Ottoman Turks. In a shivery
flash of insight I saw that the Drâa was what I had been searching for all
along: there, gazelles fleeted and oases of palms shimmered like seas of
emerald; there, Morocco ended and the no man"s land of the Sahara, vast
and ready for exploration, began; and, most important, there dwelled
Bedouin, unspoiled Bedouin who knew nothing of the pampered lifestyle of
their oil-rich brethren in the east. Whereas much of the Arab world had been
modernized, even radicalized, beyond recognition since the end of the
colonial era, the Drâa, from what I could tell, had remained a sort of ur-Arab
paradise.
As I packed to leave Morocco I read up on the Drâa. The valley
begins 150 miles southeast of Marrakesh, on the Saharan side of the
moonscape crags of the Atlas, where the red clay wadis (seasonal
riverbeds) of Ouarzazate and Dadès converge. Watered by underground
springs and the April melt of Atlas snows, the Drâa River cuts its way for 160
miles southeast across the 6,500-foot-high Saghro massif (an offshoot of the
High Atlas) and enters the Sahara proper through Beni Slimane pass in Jbel
(mount) Bani to reach the oasis village of Mhamid. From Mhamid the Drâa
veers west and snakes for 375 more miles through the desert, along the base
of the Anti-Atlas,...