We arrived in Zagora, the seven of us, by taxi from Ouarzazate. It was an illegal number of passengers, so on top of the discomfort involved in sitting on a two and a half-inch space for two and a half hours, Lois had to dive on to the floor and hide under our legs every time we passed a police roadblock.
We got out at Zagora bus station, and performed the spasmodic dances of people who have been in the same uncomfortable position for too long, jerking various limbs around frantically, making 'ooh' sounds, and discovering pains in muscles we didn't even know were there. The locals standing around the dusty square, which held a few ancient buses, looked at us as if we were loonies, but unfortunately it didn't deter the usual assortment of hotel-owners, cab-drivers and salesmen from gravitating to our group and all shouting at once. It did not seem a particularly relaxing town for tourists.
We assumed an impenetrable group formation and quickly found a likely-looking hotel, the Vallée Drâa. By now there was only one hustler left, a persistent but friendly character who had managed to stick to us all the way from the bus station, trying to sell us a camel trek for 150 dirhams. This was a hundred dirhams less than we'd been told, which wasn't necessarily bad, except that I was automatically suspicious of anyone who was that desperate to sell us anything.
We were there in the low season, which is perhaps why everyone was so desperate to get money out of us. It was the end of January, and we'd all taken some time off work - in my case, resigned - to finally get around to seeing the desert. Morocco only really catches the edge of the enormous Sahara; the edge of the Grand Erg Occidental just touches a town near the Algerian border called Er-Rachidia, but we didn't have the time or the money to get there. Zagora was the best bet: we could organise camel treks into the desert and maybe - this was what we hoped - see a few real, proper sand dunes. We'd all been fixated by a picture in the guide book of footprints stretching away over the crest of a magnificent thirty-foot yellow dune, and this was our bid to see the desert that came to mind when you thought of North Africa and the Arabs.
That evening, we sat up on top of our hotel and looked out over the uneven assortment of flat, dusty roofs and white minarets that made up the Zagora skyline. At the edge of town was Mount Zagora, a short and unusually pointed mountain; I had a vague idea that 'zagora' meant 'nipple' in some local Berber dialect. We sat in a circle of metal chairs, and although we had only been in town for a matter of hours, Iain's mysterious sources had already furnished him with a couple of spliffs which were being passed round. I hated Lois smoking, and I was secretly pleased to see her pass it straight on to Simon, who drew a tiny fraction, and then spent thirty seconds exhaling it in an elaborate fashion. We were wearing our headscarves, partly because of the cold, but mostly because of the image. James spent at least an hour staring in his customary astonishment at a Moroccan toothbrush he'd just bought, muttering to himself, 'I can't believe it's so fucking big,' in his amused and amazed Liverpool cadence.
Our initial guarded reaction to the town had disappeared, and we now all agreed that, like so many places in the south of the country, Zagora had a pleasantly relaxed atmosphere and a friendly population. They had all told us that it was 'la saison morte' which had brought the prices for camel treks down so much, but we had been deliberating over which offer to follow up. Matt and Iain had rather liked the persevering entrepreneur who had followed us, but James and I had met someone else in a shop who knew one of James's friends from Agadir. We had taken the others to his shop, where we had been given mint tea and a decent sales pitch, and all agreed to go with him. The price was 120 dirhams - surely a bargain.
We didn't rush to get up the next morning, because the camels didn't go till half-past three, but after the usual trouble finding somewhere to eat - it was the middle of Ramadan - we presented ourselves at our new friend's shop. It was on the main thoroughfare, and we wondered where all the camels were - would they just be driven by? We were quickly told that we needed to get a taxi to the kasbah on the edge of town, where the operation was run from. We decided to walk it instead, to save money and see some of the town. The attraction in Zagora is a big sign at the end of the main road pointing roughly south-east with the legend, 'Timbuctoo 52 days'. Timbuctoo, in Mali, was the major oasis at the crossroads of the trade routes across the Sahara, but I think the sign was only about 49% serious.
After leaving the town, we found the walk far longer than we had expected. Every twenty minutes or so, we would be overtaken by the trek organiser on a tiny moped, waving frantically that we were going in the right direction. He would disappear into the distance, and then wobble into view again later to reassure us. We passed a few palmeries and crossed a river in this way, and by the time we found the place we were quite tired.
A couple of camels were already outside, one huge, golden animal with a serene air about it, and the second a smaller, white one. They were lying on the ground, absently chewing, and looking patiently around them. As we gathered round to watch, the rest of the troupe were led out, all looking surprisingly different, until there were six camels sitting or standing on the dusty space in front of us. They seemed all right, we thought - docile as anything.
But there seemed to be some problem with the last one. From where we stood outside, we could hear three or four men struggling with it behind the wall, shouting and scrabbling in the dust while the camel, evidently angry, honked and screamed as if it was giving birth to a badly-positioned calf. 'Oh my God,' James said, staring in horror at the doorway. We exchanged nervous looks, all privately deciding we were not going to end up on that one. It came out behind three men, who were virtually dragging it across the courtyard, and we backed away a few feet; the problem was resolved when Iain squinted lazily at it and said, 'Yeah, I'll have him: he's got personality'. Psychosis might have seemed more accurate, but none of us were very surprised when the apparently lunatic animal instantly adopted the attitude of a domestic kitten as soon as Iain, laid-back and sardonic as usual, sat on it.
Conversely, Matt's choice, who had been dribbling away to himself quite happily until now, suddenly decided it had better things to do than be sat on by a confused group of bastard foreigners, and while Matt watched with growing apprehension, it enthusiastically started a programme of moaning, shaking, and foaming at the mouth. This sudden sign of personality prompted Matt to call it Thor.
Simon secured his place on the calm giant, whom he named Ben, and Lois took Sally, the white female. Alex picked Hovis, a majestic, older animal, while I went for the one who looked to have the least personality, and called it Gerald. I was roped to Simon and Alex, while Lois was attached to James, Iain and Matt in a separate grouping, which was none too pleased to find themselves fastened to Thor the berserker, who now had about a foot of ropy saliva hanging from the corners of his mouth. We were also accompanied by a young, white camel who was presumably the offspring of Lois's female.
The seats were made of a kind of raised, flat saddle with several thick blankets piled on for padding. It seemed quite comfortable and I thought a couple of hours on this would be fine - then they got up. Camels get up with their hind legs first, and I found myself thrown suddenly and violently forwards, clinging desperately on to the rope like I was in some kind of ludicrous Arabic rodeo. Just as I recovered my bearings, the animal pushed up with its front legs, and I went flying skywards again towards the horizontal. My shock was mitigated slightly by the sight of everyone else being similarly hurtled into position, and once you're up it does seem very high. Gerald was probably somewhere just under six feet, but Alex's and Simon's rides were considerably taller.
We set off, led by two guides, heading south-east to Mt. Zagora and the endless sand beyond. A camel's back is pretty wide, and I really think it could have been a fairly solid, comfortable mode of transport, were it not for a series of evolutionary whoopee-cushions which have rendered it about the most painful way of travelling between two given places. For a start, there's the hump, which somewhat to our surprise was positioned directly under the seats. It ruins a potentially stable back; sitting just off it, the hump rubs constantly against your legs, and it's too sharp to sit directly on top of. Then there's the added problem that a camel seems to be made up entirely of knees, so that walking becomes a series of staccato jerks which give the impression of being perpetually on the point of falling over.
The net effect on the rider is abrasive, and I pitied the African tribes who, presumably in desperation, had had to domesticate the camel - one look at the supposedly tame Thor, quietly corroding its rope with goblets of green spit, told me I never wanted to meet a wild one. Luckily for us, they seemed quite sure-footed as we picked our way around the lower slopes of Mt. Zagora and lurched off into the stony hammada beyond; we were calling jokes out to each other, throwing around the bottles of water, taking pictures as we headed in a direction which, if continued, probably wouldn't hit another town until Nigeria or Chad, in the middle of the vast continent. The calf capered around the legs of the other camels as we plodded onwards.
At sunset, we stopped for al-f'tour, a Ramadan 'breakfast', our guides presumably guessing the right time since we were out of range of even the most enthusiastic muezzin. We dismounted carefully, by now extremely saddle-sore, and waddled around like John Wayne, testing out the effects of travelling by dromedary. Simon swaggered gingerly over, saying, 'The hump is right on your bollocks,' and the ride certainly had a rather grating effect on the inside of your thighs. The camels were sitting round masticating thoughtfully, except for Thor, who had a wild glint in his eye and a collection of slobber you could beat someone to death with. Iain had some yoghurt drink left, and decided to feed the calf, which sucked at the stuff like a baby's bottle while the sky darkened quickly and smoothly behind us. It was still quite stony underfoot; 'When,' Alex wondered, 'are we going to hit the sand?'
By the time we set off again it was dark, but about half an hour into this second leg of the trip, we all started to sense a change in our surroundings, a different sensation in the way the camels were walking which made us go quiet and strain into the darkness for any sign of sand. About two hours after we'd left Zagora, the guides called a halt to pitch camp for the night, and we all jumped down eagerly on to the ground. It was sand indeed, and we ran it through our fingertips and lay on it, laughing.
There was a patch of darkness in front of us blacker than the rest, and we realised with delight that our camp was right by a little dune of our very own. It was only about fifteen feet high, and we scrambled madly up it, shouting and spraying sand behind us as we raced, collapsing finally in little happy exhausted heaps at the top. Below us, the two guides were setting up camp, having shooed off the camels. 'How will we find them tomorrow?' we had asked, and they shrugged expressively and said they just would. Two big Berber tents were being erected, one for us and one for them, and when they called us we skidded back down and pottered into our one.
We sat in a circle around the edge of the tent, which had a floor made of the thick blankets we had been using as saddles - this time they proved supremely comfortable. In the middle were two big pots of beef tagine which were doled out generously. We sat around like this contentedly for ages, eating and chatting with the guides. Because they only knew a little French, the conversation was difficult in that wonderful way that I love, where each question is accompanied by elaborate hand gestures and exaggerated intonation.
There was a bowl of water just outside the door to the tent, and as each person got up to wash their hands, I moved into their space and gradually worked my way across the whole tent to be next to Lois. My subtle manoeuvre went unnoticed, and we touched hands briefly as the mint tea was brought out.
Over the tea, which was delicious and refreshing after the journey, our new friends played us some Berber music on a small drum and a tin tray, and sang some Spanish songs which they had learned. James, the only one of us who spoke Spanish, translated the lyrics in an undertone while they sang and beat a tinny percussion accompaniment. We applauded the show, which I thought was fantastic, and then they became shyly curious.
'What you have Western music?' one of them asked. We looked at each other and tried to think of someone they might have heard of Frank Sinatra, the Rolling Stones and U2 all went by them without a glimmer of recognition, although they had heard of the Beatles. Then it hit us - we could show them the epitome of Western music. 'Alex!' someone said, 'do your Elvis impression!'
'Oh, nooo' Alex groaned, but it was too late - they had realised something was going on and they called out their own encouragement. 'Okay, okay,' Alex said finally, and he got up and assumed position in the middle of the tent. We could barely control ourselves even before he had started; the rendition had had us in fits of laughter before, and the sight of him standing up in front of two uncomprehending Moroccans was too much to bear.
Screaming, we all collapsed helplessly as he launched into the first few bars: 'Well a-bless my soul, what's a-wrong with me!', and the two Berbers stared in a kind of fascinated horror as Alex began to shake, wiggle, thrust, and generally rock 'n' roll his way into legend; I was gasping on Lois's shoulder, unable to take my eyes off him, James was crying silently into his mint tea, Iain had thrown his head back and was laughing loudly at the canvas roof; and all this time the two guides were looking frantically from us to Alex, clearly wondering what sort of people they had stranded themselves in the desert with. 'I'm in love, whoo! I'm all shook up!' Alex sang, striking a pose and assuming his rightful place, surely, as the first person ever to impersonate the King of Rock 'n' Roll in a Berber tent on the edge of the Sahara.
They left us to our own devices quite soon after that, and we picked a spot on the floor and snuggled down under the blankets. It seemed strange to think that outside this tent there was just sand, stretching off across Africa while we huddled in a tiny group by a particular, hilly dune. Lois and I kissed philosophically in the darkness, and I drifted off to sleep thinking in a new way about the relative sizes of the planet and myself.
It wasn't a great night's sleep; it hadn't been as cold as I'd expected, but it was rather cramped with all seven of us in the single tent. I was woken up from my restless daze at some ungodly hour by Lois and Iain struggling into their shoes.
'Where the hell are you going?' I managed.
'To see the sunrise,' they said. I pulled some clothes on in that dry, awkward manner that everything has in the early morning, and went out after them, waking everyone else up in the process. Soon we were all struggling up our dune in the dark again, the sand freezing cold under our hands. Wrapped in our headscarves, we sat on the crest and looked out to the horizon, where in the distance there was a faint grey glow around the mountains by Zagora.
I looked round, thinking that I could travel for over three thousand miles before I left the desert, and struggling to make that mean anything; I couldn't envisage such an immense area with virtually nothing in it but sand. The sunrise was fairly uneventful as they go, just a gradual lightening of the black sky into a range of greens and pinks, and it was light before we knew it. I kept thinking, I'm watching the sun come up over the Sahara. It seemed unreal.
In the clear new light we surveyed our camp from above. The guides were setting up a big groundsheet for us to have breakfast on, and we slid down for bread and jam, and black coffee or tea. Lois had brought a real English teabag, but we couldn't use it because they'd already brewed up a pot of Lipton Yellow Label - vastly inferior. I never drank tea at home, but abroad I unintentionally became twice as English.
Iain was looking round vaguely. 'Where are the camels?' They seemed to have disappeared, and we walked back up the dune to get a better view. There was no sign of them, and everyone decided to wander off a little way to find them. While they were hunting camels, I nipped back and grabbed an empty Sidi Ali water bottle, and took some more photos. I caught up with Lois scraping a stick across the side of a sand dune, tracing random patterns and watching the thousands of tiny grains rearrange themselves around the dips and troughs. 'Look at this, it's really cool,' she said. We stared for a while, and it was quite hypnotic, like staring into a fire.
The others were putting the finishing touches to the message 'GAP '97', or something like that, written in the sand, and we all added our handprints and took photos; my camera had run out of film, but I had another way of remembering in mind. I ran my Sidi Ali bottle along a dune until it was full, a ludicrously small sample of the desert, captured.
We got back to camp and saw the guides approaching from a different direction with the camels; before we knew it we were roped together as before, and setting off again for Zagora. We fell back into the familiar, lurching rhythm and felt the same grating soreness in the same unfortunate places. The trip back ran along similar lines as the journey there, except that Lois wasn't tied to a group and was riding free, an experience which she clearly found rather alarming, as the camel decidedly arbitrarily to wander off to poke around in some interesting bushes, or start cantering around the rest of us while she clung on. Whenever any of us came alongside her, we'd reach out and slap the camel's arse, and then watch in hysterics as the alarmed animal raced off into the distance with Lois's screaming form bouncing helplessly on top of it. We dismounted at the kasbah and paid the man a hundred and twenty dirhams - £8.60 for all of us to have our personal guides into and out of the desert on camels, with supper and breakfast plus musical entertainment. Pleased at the bargain, we tipped them and exhausted, saddle-sore and happy, walked awkwardly back towards Zagora.
The bottle of Saharan sand is still on my shelf, but it looks strangely flat and out of context in an English city bedroom. For me it acts as a reminder that the grains which I can now cramp together in a plastic receptacle were once part of the sprawling, colossal African Sahara, an awesome geographical negative to which all other sand probably aspires, but which will always remain mysteriously attractive, and desperately frightening, to the humans who see it.