Travelling Without Moving

The top of the pass was a broad, broken saddle of stones and goat-cropped grass. The heat of the morning had followed me uphill from the valley bottom, and I swung my pack off my shoulders and felt the lightest of breezes drying the greasy sweat of my forehead and my back. I drank the lukewarm water from my battered bottle hungrily, breathing rapidly between mouthfuls, and looked back the way I had come.
The great ragged brown ranges of the High Atlas ran back in tier after tier of dust-brown fading to purple with the snow-ribbed ridges of highest peaks rising over all. Here in the glaring sunlight of the day it was hot – too hot really. But in the evening when the light turned copper-coloured and the nearest mountain walls seemed to drift away to an impossible distance, it was cold.
There was a smell of sheep and fresh-cut wood, and voices from the last village below the pass.
From here I could pick out one of my earlier campsites, on high stony ground below the Tizi-n-Eddi where the view was longest of all. From there the next pass – the little Tizi-n-Tamatert – was far below, and the ice-buttress of the high core of the Toubkal Massif rose almost close enough to touch across a valley of stones and willows and villages grown out of the mountain walls like flat-capped fungi. The moonlight had been so bright that night that the glare from the snow-heights of Aksoual had been almost too sharp to look at and I could read without my torch long after sunset. Later in the night a hard, dirty wind came up and buffeted my little tent, but the sun had returned in the morning. Picking my way down the steep mountainside I had passed Berber women in red headscarves cutting the yellow grass of the slopes for kindling, and a little way above the village of Tacheddirt I startled a red fox. It went springing away down the hillside like a gazelle, whipping its white-tipped ginger tail behind it.

I had crossed seven passes in the last week, some of them still marked with dripping, icy skeins of winter snow, even now at the end of April; this would be the last. I had slept alone at high campgrounds among hard stones, or between the crippled forms of mountain junipers, and gone on my way early, startling coveys of grey grouse from under the thorn bushes, and pausing at midday on some high col to eat cheese and tinned sardines and to watch eagles circling in the thin air of a clear, yellow-edged sky. My feet were battered and strapped up with pieces of tape, and the night before, spending a night in the trekkers’ trailhead village at Imlil, I had eaten a bad tagine, and my stomach was now in a state of severe fragility. But I felt the tremendous happiness that comes of moving through high country alone and on foot, and carrying everything with you.

There was a crooked tree with a spreading canopy of thorny branches at the crest of the little pass. I sat in its shade and boiled water for tea. While I was squatting beside the guttering primus stove a herd of goats came squawking and blethering up from the lower slopes, and the goatherd, a thin man with scored cheeks and a long brown jellabiya wandered across to cadge a drink from me. I made him tea and he took it wordlessly and drank it quickly, then, with fragments of French in one direction and fragments of Arabic in the other, he told me that it was far to Ouirgane and that I should not linger if I was to get there by nightfall.
He was right: it was a long way, along a narrowing, descending valley, growing hotter and hotter and stiller and stiller as I went, my feet more painful, my stomach more tender. I saw no people along the way, though once, amid broken fields by the stream, a donkey galloped along the path ahead of me, kicking and whinnying hysterically. I stumbled into the big village on the road in a humming turquoise dusk, exhausted and thirsty.
My stomach was worse the next day and I took a beige grande taxi down the running road through the iron-coloured lower hills to Marrakech. The city was hot and dusty and the pavements gave off a pulse of angry heat. I had left a bag in a guesthouse on a yellow alleyway south of the Jema el Fna. I collected it, went to the terminal, and caught a bus to Essaouira.

My feet were ruined and the stomach problem lingered, but I found a cheap hotel on a long white street of pottery-sellers and skinny cats. It was a tall building with echoing stairwells and dusty corridors. But it was the tallest building in the medina – except the mosques – and my room was on the top floor, high-ceilinged, bare and clean. There was a mirror and a washbasin in the corner, and a bed, and the walls were painted white, and a little blue-edged window opened through the thick wall, and you could see the jumble of white rooftops and the block-square Moroccan minarets, and beyond that the sea. From the rooftop itself you could see the whole town, all flaking white walls and blue windows and seagulls and a long breeze run up the Atlantic coast of Africa. You could hear the sea breaking on the black rocks and smell the thoyya wood from the markets.
I was there for five days while my stomach settled and my feet mended. In the mornings I wandered down the dark-hollow stairs and along the dust-cut white street with their uneven cubist lines and sudden pools of bright sunlight, to the bakery on the edge of the place. It had a tiled courtyard and cast iron chairs and good coffee and pain au chocolat. Sometimes after breakfast I wandered along the harbour past the fish-market and the bow-backed sardine boats with the smell of tar and diesel and salt and old rope familiar from childhood. Sometimes I stopped for coffee on the way back and read the paper, then drank another coffee, and then another, or moved slowly through the white-blue-sun-shade byways of the old town in aimless circles.
But mostly I sat on the bed in my high white room while the clean light moved in slow circles on the bare walls, or cleared myself a place to sit amongst the dust and seagull shit and broken buckets on the roof, and read. The bag I had collected in Marrakech was full of books.
You can travel a very long way without moving at all.

***

When you cannot go anywhere there are always books, and books can take you elsewhere very, very quickly. You can smell the wet, brown rot of a Bangkok canal, or the sweat-and-blood of some wild gathering. You can feel the hard stones beneath your feet and shiver at the cold desert edge without leaving your bed. And it is very good indeed.
There are travellers well-known, and you know that you can go to their books – in a high white room or on a dreary English train journey in winter or in a summer garden under the apple tree – and be sure of the journey you will make. Like Wilfred Thesiger. I can take a tattered, second-hand copy of one of his books – like the one I found on the bottom shelf in a bookshop in Byron Bay with carpet on the floor – with blemishes and the pages falling out, and know that very soon I will be able to see the light coming through the reeds, and the long boats moving slowly along stagnant waterways, or watch a slim youth with long black hair padding barefoot over the hot sand.
Sometimes it is more the company that the places that they show you that matters – Robert Byron, smirking, digging you in the ribs, James Cameron, sharper than lime juice. Still others give pleasure by making it how plain what an objectionably belligerent companion they would be – Paul Theroux for one. Sometimes they are new and delightful surprise, like Jason Elliot wandering in his melancholy Unexpected Light, or Rory Stewart walking across Afghanistan in winter.
And then there are those – found in dark shelves at the back of shops down side streets in summer, with the door open to the bright street and the smell of dust and damp cardboard – who might now belong only to me. Does anyone else know, for example, that The Narrow Smile, by Peter Mayne, is probably the very best travel book of the mid-20th Century by an Englishman? Better than The Road to Oxiana certainly; suffused with perfect self-deprecation and glittering wit and lightness of touch and bittersweet melancholy. It has been out of print for decades and I found it by chance.
But favourite above all, for the sheer perfection of his style – and I reread two of his books in that white room in Essaouira – is Bruce Chatwin. The pared-down simplicity of the description makes you stop and hold the book closed for a moment to shiver with delight, then reread the passage again. You hear and feel and smell Afghanistan or Patagonia coming off the page in three or four words where anyone else would have used fifty. And how could he have been so spectacularly endowed that he knew that while Alice Springs’ grid of scorching streets mattered, that the long white socks of the men there were important, what would really make the reader twitch for a moment and involuntarily flick at the whining outback fly that they imagined had buzzed at their ear, even though they were on a train to London or in a guesthouse in Essaouira, was the fact that those men were forever getting in and out of Land Cruisers?
How could you know that that – in and out – was what was so crucial in that scene?
But there is one problem, one niggling doubt when you read Chatwin, and that is this: there is no line, no boundary between fiction and reality. He might have known how to sketch out a room or a street or a scene so sharply that you could almost reach out and touch it, but you have no idea whether what he wrote had really happened or not.
Perhaps it doesn’t matter, but for the record, everything I have written here is perfectly true.


© Tim Hannigan 2008