living with the Nomads

I cry Abdul told me the night before I left. it was hard to determine how depressed he really was and how much was culture. I was heading off to spend the  next week walking in the mountains. After hitching to Nkob I trecked over the mountain mule trail through rocky pinicals, at dusk meeting a young wide eyed mountain gardener tending to olives and nothing else but  a huge crop of leafy green stuff that his family allown lived on and probably little else. " Twa, dormy in Masion avec Mwa"  he comunicated. So I spent the night in his small stone hut. We had a dinner of cuscus,  for my 5th night  in a row  with of course the leafy grean stuff on top, then swapped notes on english and the Berber language. His mothr returned home after dark from her day tending the goats. She wore a wooly dress and socks pulled high. The night was spent between two rugs on the stone floor and in the morning I continued on over the mountain. One  small boy guided me up the slope with his donkey then asked "Une stilo". I think  I must return to Morocco with a thousand pencils as all the mountain childen greet you with this request.  The boy allready had a pocket bursting with stilos and I left him on a rock singin out into the gorge. How many days of his life had been spent on this rock and how many more stiIl were to spent apon it I could only imagion. I spent the night exhausted under the stormy sky but too tired to pitch my tent. Luckely the moon came out but with it the cry of wolves. I heard a nearby patter  as 4 white doglike profiles scampered past a few meteres away.  A few minuts later the noise was heard on my other side. Was I being circled? I gathered a collection of rocks and prayed to fall asleep and let the night take care of itself, but it was of course a long night. The wolves clearly did not want to eat me however. I walked to the Beautiful Dades valley the next morning, and through the 60km long vegetable garden. I was invited to sleep in a house with a farmer one night and then work with him and his tractor the  next morning. This started by me and 5 local men pushing it up a hill so it could roll down to start the engine. Little work is done in this garden but the men mainly sit and have tea parties under the trees by the river. The next night was spent in my tent at the riverside and was the night I descovered that at some stage between Marakech and here, I had lost my secret stash of maybe 300 euro and now had $50NZ to get me the next month in Morocco. It was in a way good to now feel I had nothing to loose. I reached the town of Msmrir 2 days later which was a cold miserable place but I was invited in by a cafe owner and played with local boys in the dust building a mud iglu in which to cook potatoes and then bash in the dirt to bury them. While we waited for them to cook, we showed off our tricks of physical masculunity with karate kicks and hand stands. The next morning an old bearded man in a camel cloth jalaba walked in to the cafe. He had feet like a camel and I could not tell where the foot finished and the leather started. The owner told me this man was nomad and I could follow him in to the mountains and live a few days with him. He was completely unresponsive to my conversation and looked through me with vacant eyes. Never the less I strapped my pack to his mule and followed him out of town. In the first hour he spoke to say, ,"Bulburro" and point at the rock. In the second hour he spoke to say some other long elaborate word and point at water that the mule stopped to drink.  I was sure this word was too long to be something as fundamental as water. He spoke in the 3rd hour to say, "Mzein" meaning fine. I asumed he was refering to my keeping up his fast pace with my pack now on my shoulders as it was not staying on the mules. It was a relief to finaly hear a word that I understood, and some confirmation thast he was aware of my following him for the last 3 hours. The pace was hard with my pack but I was happy to be burning into the small sump  full of syrupy sugar tea which had been accumulating somewhere in the proximity of my liver. He spoke in the fourth hour after unexpectedly collapsing onto the hillside groaning. He indicated throbbing in his joints and spoke what souded like "Taxi". As this was far from down town New York I had as much hope in my success of hailing a cab  as I did of him breaking into a Michael Jackson rendition. Yet I scoured the vast rocky mountains and hoped that he was just a drama queen. I was feeling very close to my quest to touch the remote yet now was hoping to arrive at a sunny plataue camp full of warm tents and freindly smiling topless woman. 20 min later he rose to his feet, recovered the wayward mule and stumbled 10 min over the ridge to a cold slopey hillside with a brown camel wool tent about 25m squared, head height in the middle and sloping down to the dirt floor. A warmly ragged woman greeted me and led me inside. There sat 2 other woman around some burning sticks. The lady pointed me to sit on a dirty rug scattered with goat poo. As I stepped on, she made a noise and indicated that I remove my shoes as if the rug were a prestine surface. There I sat as the woman peered at me like an animal. "Bye bye", said the witchy looking woman. Clearly I was not welcome. " Diram, fluce", she squeaked. "Makain fluce" I replied. I removed 2 loaves of bread and placed them at her feet. At this stage the other woman had left the tent. She glanced around shiftily and stuffed one loaf down her shirt. The other woman returned and continued to croak words to me and cackle with creepy grins. I indicated that I would sleep the night and leave in the morning, which they seemed to accept then left me alown in the tenst sitting awkwardly on my pooey rug. A few minuts later I went out into the cold to help the ladied bash some spikey weed with rocks and scatter out the pieces for the sheep and camels to munch. All the while thet spoke on nothing but fluce. I agreed I would give them money later one the entire family was present. As night aproached a young man returned with the flock of sheep. I introduced myself and was happy to be returned with a welcoming smile and some arabic conversation. That night he fed me generousely on an entre of kebabs of goat fat wrapped in stomach lining, or stomach lining tied up with intestine, followed by a main of mash potatoe soup eaten with bread. I went to sleep under 20kg of camel wool blankets, feeling I had eaten sufficient for an antarctic expodition. I slept next to the old man who snored and murmured while goats walked consistantly accross our lying boddies. All night was the consistant rhythical munch of the goats chewing their cud at my ear. I woke to a breakfast of boiled bread soup then stood by the friendly man as he lit bushes on fire to keep us warm while the sheep dispersed accross the hillside. Every now and then he would throw rocks to heard the sheep up the hill where he would light another bush for us to warm by. I returned to the tent, concerned the woman may be digging into my pack, repeated the fluce conversation, gave them each 10 Dh, a bracelett and a couple of apples. They still asked for more. I then had the old man sign my traveling snoopy doll. He was fascinated by the pen and needed a lesson on how to hold it upright so that the ink would flow to the correct end. He scribbled on snoopey's cheek and mimed that the pen was worth a lot of money. I offered it to him but he refused. The men were most hospitible, friendly and asked for nothing, yet the woman seemed mean and continually wanted things. I put on my pack, said goodbye and trecked off in the direction they said was the vilage of Tamtatuche. I spent the night in a hotel where I worked helping the man to make Tarjine for his guests, then shared a night of music with them. The man said I could stay as long as I liked but the village was too cold for me and I trecked on in the morning. In the Todrah Gorge I stopped to play some guitar with a blind man tending a turbin stall, who then invited me home to his room with an elctronic drum machine, PA, microphones and had a continued jam with him and another great black gimbri guitar player then spent the night for free in his friends hotel. Then next day was spent with and 18 year old boy as we tried to make replicas of my flute usinf babmoo from his garden, plastic bags and a plastic bottle. I phoned a man named Brahm who I had hitch hiked with  to see if I could still work in his garden in Tenighir as he had invited me to do so 2 weeks earlyer. He turned out o have no work for me, but we spent the night together in his shed with his 5 garden woman who married me to one of them using an olive branch ring. Thus was the end of my Nomad wanderings with my feet sore and blistered from one weeks walking.