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A traveler finds beauty in the desert of Morocco, from the changing light on its sands to the kindness and curiousity of its people.
By GRAHAM BRINK, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times, published February 10, 2002
MERZOUGA, Morocco -- The sand slams into Zahid's full-length white robe, flattening it against his chest and thighs, blowing the extra material up behind him like a cape. A heavily wrapped scarf covers his head, leaving only a slit for his dark eyes.
He leads the riderless camel through the low-rolling dunes between two ranges of 600-foot peaks. Our footprints begin disappearing, first in minutes, then in seconds. The grains penetrate zippers and chafe exposed skin. Throats scratch. Eyes slowly close with grit.
Gait slowed and head bent low, Zahid pushes on. In comic contrast, the camel seems to smile through his thick lips and bat his huge lashes. We are a couple of hours into a four-day trek through the giant dunes. Four days? I think. Only if we make it though the next four minutes.
Then, the wind vanishes.
No big deal, Zahid announces while shaking a pailful of sand out of his scarf. In the summers, the flying sand blots out the sky, he says. Camels get lost. Nomads sometimes die.
The dunes, named Erg Chebbi, rest in the middle of a plain on the western edge of the Sahara. Chebbi is the largest erg, or sand sea, in Morocco. At about 150 square miles, it's small compared to the Grand Ergs in Algeria and Libya.
Zahid wonders why anyone would travel so far to visit his country's super-sized sand box. He's not complaining; he just doesn't get it.
"Sandstorms. Not fun. No, no, no," Zahid says.
When I first thought about flying to Morocco last summer, it seemed a convenient location to live out my desert fantasies -- camels, sand, nomads, brutal weather -- my own sanitized version of Lawrence of Arabia.
After Sept. 11, the trip took on new allure. It became what you don't do. You don't vacation alone in a Muslim country in the middle of a war on terrorism when many people are scared to visit grandparents in Omaha. You don't insist on talking religion and politics in a strange and sometimes volatile land.
In America, we are taught to keep strangers at arm's length. In recent months, that lesson has grown to "suspect everyone," especially anyone who looks Arab. This was a chance to turn the tables, to be the stranger, the one suspicion is cast upon.
"You ready to walk?" Zahid asks as I pull my shoes back on and wipe the remnants of the sandstorm from my cords and long-sleeved shirt.
Zahid's casual cool is bred from a lifetime of struggle. At 55, Zahid (like many Moroccans, he uses no last name) has overcome sun blindness, 130-degree temperatures, camel thieves, tribal disputes, disease and those hellish sandstorms, just to name the most obvious.
A prolonged drought forced Zahid and his wife off the plains four years ago and into a remote hamlet called Taboumiat, population 30. They bought a small house with a view of the dunes, and Zahid took up handling camels for tourists.
He hasn't had much to do lately.
Even in the desert, Zahid has had to deal with the fallout from the collapse of the "grand buildings." He wonders if he will have to return to his life as a herder on the plains, with little money to buy new camels. Will his wife be forced to give up her new loves -- her stove, her friends, the lights that come on with a flick of a switch?
For Zahid the choice is between convenience and hardship. The dunes are a living. Me? I'm entranced by the eerie beauty.
Throughout the day, the color of the sand ranges from pink to red to brown to black. Look one way and the dunes are a washed-out canvas. Turn around and the sun has transformed them into a masterpiece of shadows and contrast. With the rising heat, the smaller dunes appear to move like slow waves.
The wind shapes the dunes quickly, shearing and building peaks, bending razor-straight ridges into S's. The worst storms kick sand high into the sky, sometimes carrying it as far as the Caribbean islands.
The only other person on our trek is Zahid's 18-year-old assistant, Hassan. He can cook a tangy Moroccan stew, carry a tune and speak parts of seven languages. The part of English he knows doesn't include many pronouns. So whether he is talking about the camel or his mother, the sentence begins with "I." As in, "I eat a lot of desert plants" or "I married my father in a ceremony near the dunes."
On the first day, he keeps saying we are headed for a "weesis." A weesis? It sounds more like a stifled sneeze than the palm tree-lined "oasis" where we wind up for the first night.
That evening, we bundle under camel-hair blankets and stoke the fire as the temperature drops into the low 40s. A full moon backlights Zahid's every breath. With his sinewy frame, well-trimmed black mustache and chiseled features, he looks like a slightly darker version of Burt Reynolds.
The conversation gets going with stupid tourist stories -- the winner being Hassan's yarn about a Dutch guy who thought it would be funny to brush his camel's teeth until it bit down, swallowing the brush and the tip of the man's middle finger.
Hassan recalls a myth about how the dunes were created thousands of years ago when the local people refused to help a woman and child who needed food and shelter during a festival. Incensed, God buried the town and its inhabitants in sand.
The story illustrates the importance many Moroccans place on hospitality. In the time it takes to travel only a few miles, a stranger on a bus will offer up a small cup of milk and some smoked sardines, then invite me to his sister's wedding.
At first all the attention makes me suspicious. What scam are they trying to pull? I check my pockets for my money and make sure my bag is still where it should be. Despite my obvious skepticism, the invitations keep coming. I figure the whole country cannot be after my wallet. My guard starts to come down.
Moroccans, it turns out, consider guests to be gifts from Allah.
"We need more gifts," Zahid tells me in Arabic. "Why'd they all go away?"
I'm not sure what to tell him other than that Westerners aren't comfortable and, in some cases, are downright angry with the Arab world. I begin to tell him about the Israeli-Palestinian debacle and Middle Eastern politics, but he gets a perplexed look. It's tough to explain new global realities to someone who has never seen a globe.
A few minutes later, Zahid quietly moves to a flat patch 20 yards away to pray. Zahid is Berber, an indigenous tribe introduced to Islam in the 7th century by the invading Arabs.
Praying is common in a country with 29-million Muslims, 98 percent of the population. No one complains when taxi drivers pull to the side of the highway and drop to their knees on the gravel shoulder. Train passengers switch seats so they face Mecca and quietly whisper "Allahu akbar" (Allah is the greatest).
Zahid doffs his sandals and socks. With the dry sand, he washes his hands, forearms, feet and ankles and runs his hands over his head. He faces east and prays, standing, then kneeling, four times.
Zahid knows that five times a day Osama bin Laden prays the same way to the same God. He smiles when he considers what possible ties a camel herder in the middle of nowhere could have with a Saudi Arabian heir turned terrorist mastermind.
"Are you a terrorist?" I ask jokingly.
No, but you look like you could be, he shoots back with a smile.
The only thing Zahid knows about terrorism is what he's heard from tourists. He knows of the Basques in northern Spain and remembers a Japanese group telling him about poisonous gas in the Tokyo subway.
Zahid has never visited a city. Four months ago, he didn't know what a skyscraper was. But he remembers feeling sad and then angered when he heard about the Sept. 11 attacks. He said toppling a building is like stealing -- property, money and lives -- and stealing is never justified.
In the desert when a camel died, any Berber could leave it and the load it was carrying where it fell by simply marking the camel with his brand, Zahid says. No other Berber who happened along would take the load.
Whether it's a dead camel in the desert or a 110-story building, it doesn't matter to Zahid.
"Bin Laden took the load," he said. "There is never an excuse for that."
Each morning after making tea and toast, Zahid gathers the saddle bags and ropes and begins a daily battle with our 1,000-pound camel, named Jimi Hendrix after the rock star who once visited Morocco.
With 8-foot-tall Jimi lying on his belly, Zahid plops the saddle bags over the hump, then digs away the sand under Jimi's belly to affix a rope. He skillfully lassos another rope through Jimi's mouth. With each addition to the load -- 50 pounds of bottled water or a towel -- Jimi turns his long neck to stare at Zahid, baring his yellowing teeth and mucusy tongue, and lets out a series of long, wet, guttural bellows that echo off the dunes.
In the uneven landscape, Jimi is an uncomfortable, butt-numbing ride. So for most of the trip, he acts as a beast of burden, carrying all the gear as we walk.
With the load secured, our caravan moves out of the dunes onto the hard rocky pan that makes up most of the Sahara. The buttes that mark the Algerian border lie a few miles to our right. Keeping the dunes to our left, we walk past a herd of goats. A big-eared Fennec fox eyes us from a distance.
An hour later, we run into a Berber family, their black camel-hair tent pitched on level ground about a mile from the dunes. The family has 30 camels and 50 goats grazing nearby. Two boys kick a soft soccer ball high in the air and give chase barefoot across shards of fossilized rock.
A man dressed in a flowing black and orange robe waves hello.
"As-salaam 'alaikum (Peace upon you)," he says.
His name is Abdullah, and while pouring tea for me he explains in so-so English that he is not a nomad, although he was born in the desert. He left when he was 15 in search of steadier work. Now he sells carpets in Rabat, Morocco's capital city of 1.3-million people, a full day's journey by bus. He has come to visit his sister's family, who own the herds.
He invites us into the tent, which is tall enough to stand up in. In a back corner two baby goats keep warm under the tent flaps. Lately in Rabat, the "worries are more," Abdullah says. In the desert, the rest of the world seems so distant, less important in a way.
"Hard to relax in the city right now," he says. "Don't know what will happen next. What Morocco's role will be."
Abdullah had little formal schooling, but he can read the daily newspapers. He hopes the world situation doesn't destabilize the country, making it even harder for young people to find work. He's read about violent clashes at universities between Islamist student movements and government troops. He wonders how the country's allies will react if terrorist cells are found in Morocco, a country with a reputation as a bridge between Arab and western countries.
Moroccans like to be thought of as the friendliest people on earth, Abdullah says.
"Everyone is a brother," he says. "But I fear some will take advantage of that."
The next day, we've been walking for an hour toward the next "weesis" when Jimi starts munching on a shrub. We all stop for a rest.
Hassan wants to know who worked in the World Trade Center and the size of the hijacked planes. His family doesn't have a TV, and he hasn't seen the footage. He's having difficulty fathoming the height of the Twin Towers.
"See that," I say, pointing to a 600-foot dune. "Twice as tall as that."
He pauses a second, looking into the sky above the sandy peak. The tallest building in the biggest town he's visited is just a few stories high.
"How did they not fall down earlier?" he asks.
We arrive at the oasis just after noon. Zahid starts making lunch just for me. Zahid and Hassan cannot eat. Not yet, at least.
We are traveling in the middle of Ramadan, the holy month when Muslims are asked to renew their relationship with God through prayer and fasting. From dawn to dusk, Zahid and Hassan do not eat or drink, not even water.
Zahid seems at ease with the rigor. The younger Hassan, on the other hand, spends the day talking about water, drinking and thirst.
He asks if Americans drink water right from the tap. What's the biggest lake I've ever seen? Could I drink from it? He explains, with a hint of envy, that a camel's kidneys can concentrate urine until it becomes thick like syrup and saltier than the ocean. Camels also extract so much water from their fecal pellets that they can be used right away for fuel, he says.
In the late afternoon, he wraps himself in a blanket and sleeps away a couple of hours. He says he dreams of eggs and toast and sardines.
Rejuvenated after eating the evening meal of dates, bread and apples, Hassan convinces us to climb the big dune behind the oasis. With each step up the steep slope, the sand slides away underfoot. It's like climbing on a Stairmaster; our hearts pound and our thighs burn, but we don't really go anywhere. We change to a zigzag pattern and 15 minutes later reach the peak.
A few lights from Taboumiat and neighboring Merzouga shine in the distance. Behind us, we can see the Algerian desert. The dunes seem dark and moody, all blues and blacks. As the moon rises, long shadows stretch across the sand.
Zahid asks about the mood in the big cities like Casablanca, Fes and Marrakesh. Are there lots of military patrols? (No.) Do people seem worried? (A little.) Have I been harassed or threatened when people find out I live in the United States? (No.)
The next day we walk back into town, past the makeshift soccer field and the smattering of sand-colored homes with bright blue doors. I'm the one the locals will peer out their windows to see. They smile. I smile back. Are they suspicious, afraid? I have no way to know, but I don't think so. It seems more like curiosity, more like "How was the trip?" than "Don't cause any trouble." They have felt their own reverberations from Sept. 11 but still want to share dinner and tea.
It has become clear to me that they live by a less suspicious ethos. Here, they presume I am okay. Back home, we demand proof.
I say goodbye to my two companions. In the days that follow, Hassan will help buy food for his family by selling some of the fossilized rocks he finds in the desert and later polishes to a shine. Zahid will hope for the knock on his door that signals the start of another trip.
I will cross back over the Atlas Mountains to Casablanca and fly home through New York City, the "grand buildings" missing from the skyline. Before the plane to Tampa takes off, a flight attendant asks if anyone onboard knows how to speak Turkish. The heads in front of me pop up or crane down the aisle, eyeballing the tall, dark-skinned man near the door.
The looks say it all. Stranger, don't cause any trouble.