Morocco Desert Quotes

Individually, every grain of sand brushing against my hands represents a story, an experience, and a block for me to build upon for the next generation.

Come to think of it, maybe God is a He after all, because only a cruel force would create something this beautiful and make it inaccessible to most people.

There is a whirlwind in southern Morocco, the aajej, against which the fellahin defend themselves with knives. There is the africo, which has at times reached into the city of Rome. The alm, a fall wind out of Yugoslavia. The arifi, also christened aref or rifi, which scorches with numerous tongues. These are permanent winds that live in the present tense. There are other, less constant winds that change direction, that can knock down horse and rider and realign themselves anticlockwise. The bist roz leaps into Afghanistan for 170 days--burying villages. There is the hot, dry ghibli from Tunis, which rolls and rolls and produces a nervous condition. The haboob--a Sudan dust storm that dresses in bright yellow walls a thousand metres high and is followed by rain. The harmattan, which blows and eventually drowns itself into the Atlantic. Imbat, a sea breeze in North Africa. Some winds that just sigh towards the sky. Night dust storms that come with the cold. The khamsin, a dust in Egypt from March to May, named after the Arabic word for 'fifty,' blooming for fifty days--the ninth plague of Egypt. The datoo out of Gibraltar, which carries fragrance. There is also the ------, the secret wind of the desert, whose name was erased by a king after his son died within it. And the nafhat--a blast out of Arabia. The mezzar-ifoullousen--a violent and cold southwesterly known to Berbers as 'that which plucks the fowls.' The beshabar, a black and dry northeasterly out of the Caucasus, 'black wind.' The Samiel from Turkey, 'poison and wind,' used often in battle. As well as the other 'poison winds,' the simoom, of North Africa, and the solano, whose dust plucks off rare petals, causing giddiness. Other, private winds. Travelling along the ground like a flood. Blasting off paint, throwing down telephone poles, transporting stones and statue heads. The harmattan blows across the Sahara filled with red dust, dust as fire, as flour, entering and coagulating in the locks of rifles. Mariners called this red wind the 'sea of darkness.' Red sand fogs out of the Sahara were deposited as far north as Cornwall and Devon, producing showers of mud so great this was also mistaken for blood. 'Blood rains were widely reported in Portugal and Spain in 1901.' There are always millions of tons of dust in the air, just as there are millions of cubes of air in the earth and more living flesh in the soil (worms, beetles, underground creatures) than there is grazing and existing on it. Herodotus records the death of various armies engulfed in the simoom who were never seen again. One nation was 'so enraged by this evil wind that they declared war on it and marched out in full battle array, only to be rapidly and completely interred.

Being the Novelist-in-Residence at a riad hotel in the kasbah of an Arabic North African city is a lot like trying to write one’s memoirs on shreds of napkins in a nuthouse.

I had travelled from Spain into Morocco and from there south to the Atlas Mountains, at the edge of the Sahara Desert…one night, in a youth hostel that was more like a stable, I woke and walked out into a snowstorm. But it wasn’t the snow I was used to in Minnesota, or anywhere else I had been. Standing bare chest to cool night, wearing flip-flops and shorts, I let a storm of stars swirl around me. I remember no light pollution, heck, I remember no lights. But I remember the light around me-the sense of being lit by starlight- and that I could see the ground to which the stars seemed to be floating down. I saw the sky that night in three dimensions- the sky had depth, some stars seemingly close and some much farther away, the Milky Way so well defined it had what astronomers call “structure”, that sense of its twisting depths. I remember stars from one horizon to another, making a night sky so plush it still seems like a dream. It was a time in my life when I was every day experiencing something new. I felt open to everything, as though I was made of clay, and the world was imprinting on me its breathtaking beauty (and terrible reality.) Standing nearly naked under that Moroccan sky, skin against the air, the dark, the stars, the night pressed its impression, and my lifelong connection was sealed.

At the same distance from it is the city of Sala, situate on a river which bears the same name, a place which stands upon the very verge of the desert, and though infested by troops of elephants, is much more exposed to the attacks of the nation of the Autololes, through whose country lies the road to Mount Atlas, the most fabulous locality even in Africa. [...] There formerly existed some Commentaries written by Hanno, a Carthaginian general, who was commanded, in the most flourishing times of the Punic state, to explore the sea-coast of Africa. The greater part of the Greek and Roman writers have followed him, and have related, among other fabulous stories, that many cities there were founded by him, of which no remembrance, nor yet the slightest vestige, now exists. [V,1]

The city of Gregoria was ahead. The boys were sleeping, and I was alone in my eternity at the wheel, and the road ran straight as an arrow. Not like driving across Carolina, or Texas, or Arizona, or Illinois; but like driving across the world and into the places where we would finally learn ourselves among the Fellahin Indians of the world, the essential strain of the basic primitive, wailing humanity that stretches in a belt around the equatorial belly of the world from Malaya (the long fingernail of China) to India the great subcontinent to Arabia to Morocco to the selfsame deserts and jungles of Mexico and over the waves to Polynesia to mystic Siam of the Yellow Robe and on around, on around, so that you hear the same mournful wail by the rotted walls of Cádiz, Spain, that you hear 12,000 miles around in the depths of Benares the Capital of the World.

In 1955 flying was much more dangerous than it is now, but there was a party atmosphere aboard long flights and everyone enjoyed the ever-flowing drinks and food. Smoking was the norm and it didn’t take long before the cabin was full of smoke. The stewardesses were friendly and I can remember some that were very friendly. I don’t remember much about my time in Lisbon because, before I knew it, we were in the air again heading south across the ocean to the vastness of the North African desert. The light yellow sand under us in Morocco and the Spanish Sahara was endless. The fine sand went from the barren coastal surf and endless miles of beautiful beaches, inland as far as the eye could see. After a time I saw what I believed, at the time, to be a radio relay station located out on a desolate sand spit near Villa Bens. It was only later that I found out that it was Castelo de Tarfaya, a small fortification on the North African coast. Tarfaya was occupied by the British in 1882, when they established a trading post called Casa del Mar. This forgotten part of the world is now in the southern part of Morocco.

Nuances of shade and colour in the sand and rock; desert textures - fine, rough, ordered, chaotic, ridged with salt-crust; a broken and wind-swept landscape blends seamlessly into hidden valleys gentled with acacia trees; the smoothness of an ancient lake-bed followed by long struggles with soft sand; rolling hills tessellated with smooth black stones, so ordered it could be a mosaic; salt pans, still wet and yielding under our tyres, the surface cracked and wrinkled like elephant-skin; fine, milky, wind-blown dust so thick that the lower half of a body or motorbike simply disappears below waist height and strange half-people move mysteriously, seemingly unconnected with the ground; crisp-edged dunes lie on the hard desert surface, sculpted by the wind's hand; gnarled acacia trees, lonely patriarchs, seem to crouch and writhe against the heat, standing incongruous in the sand - disparate images flicker through my mind, blend and come together, separate and coalesce like slides flashed briefly against a wall and then they blend again.

Marathon des Sables Location: Sahara Desert, Morocco Distance: 251km – 156 miles

After a time I saw what I believed, at the time, to be a radio relay station located out on a desolate sand spit near Villa Bens. It was only later that I found out that it was Castelo de Tarfaya, a small fortification on the North African coast. Tarfaya was occupied by the British in 1882, when they established a trading post, called Casa del Mar. It is now considered the Southern part of Morocco. In the early ‘20s, the French pioneering aviation company, Aéropostale, built a landing strip in this desert, for its mail delivery service. By 1925 their route was extended to Dakar, where the mail was transferred onto steam ships bound for Brazil. A monument now stands in Tarfaya, to honor the air carrier and its pilots as well as the French aviator and author Antoine Marie Jean-Baptiste Roger, comte de Saint-Exupéry better known as Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. As a newly acclaimed author in the literary world. “Night Flight,” or “Vol de nuit,” was the first of Saint-Exupéry’s literary works and won him the prix Femina, a French literary prize created in 1904. The novel was based on his experiences as an early mail pilot and the director of the “Aeroposta Argentina airline,” in South America. Antoine is also known for his narrative “The Little Prince” and his aviation writings, including the lyrical 1939 “Wind, Sand and Stars” which is Saint-Exupéry’s 1939, memoir of his experiences as a postal pilot. It tells how on the week following Christmas in 1935, he and his mechanic amazingly survived a crash in the Sahara desert. The two men suffered dehydration in the extreme desert heat before a local Bedouin, riding his camel, discovered them “just in the nick of time,” to save their lives. His biographies divulge numerous affairs, most notably with the Frenchwoman Hélène de Vogüé, known as “Nelly” and referred to as “Madame de B.

People still said that “The Sun Never Sets on the British Empire,” even though the Commonwealth was starting to come apart. In spite of the obvious, it was unthinkable that the United States had a colony in Africa; well they had one, and that was where I was headed! World War II had been over for ten years and in Europe they were getting on with things and for now all was well in Africa, and with the World! Unless especially fitted out, aircraft didn’t have the range to cross the Atlantic in one jump, so after leaving Idlewild Airport in New York City, we flew halfway across the Atlantic Ocean to the Portuguese island of Santa Maria in the Azores. After refueling and stretching our legs we continued on to Lisbon. Our layovers were only for as long as it took to take care of business. There were no days built in, for me to have a leisurely, gentlemanly, civilized journey to my destination. Instead my seat was beginning to feel as hard as a rock pile. The engines continued to drone on as the Atlantic Ocean eventually gave way to the Iberian Peninsula. My view of Portugal was only what I could see from the air and what was at the airport. Again we landed for fuel in Lisbon, and then without skipping a beat, headed south across the Mediterranean to the North African desert. The beaches under us, in Morocco and the Spanish Sahara, were endless and the sand went from the barren coastal surf inland, to as far as the eye could see. With very few exceptions there was no evidence of civilization.

Back in 1415, Prince Henry and his brothers had convinced their father, King John of Portugal, to capture the principal Muslim trading depot in the western Mediterranean: Ceuta, on the northeastern tip of Morocco. These brothers were envious of Muslim riches, and they sought to eliminate the Islamic middleman so that they could find the southern source of gold and Black captives. After the battle, Moorish prisoners left Prince Henry spellbound as they detailed trans-Saharan trade routes down into the disintegrating Mali Empire. Since Muslims still controlled these desert routes, Prince Henry decided to “seek the lands by the way of the sea.” He sought out those African lands until his death in 1460, using his position as the Grand Master of Portugal’s wealthy Military Order of Christ (successor of the Knights Templar) to draw venture capital and loyal men for his African expeditions. In 1452, Prince Henry’s nephew, King Afonso V, commissioned Gomes Eanes de Zurara to write a biography of the life and slave-trading work of his “beloved uncle.” Zurara was a learned and obedient commander in Prince Henry’s Military Order of Christ. In recording and celebrating Prince Henry’s life, Zurara was also implicitly obscuring his Grand Master’s monetary decision to exclusively trade in African slaves. In 1453, Zurara finished the inaugural defense of African slave-trading, the first European book on Africans in the modern era. The Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea begins the recorded history of anti-Black racist ideas. Zurara’s inaugural racist ideas, in other words, were a product of, not a producer of, Prince Henry’s racist policies concerning African slave-trading.1

Excursion from marrakech offers the possibilty to discover Morocco with all his rich history from his amazing Sahara deserts, imperial cities ( MARRAKECH MEKNES FES AND RABAT ) ancient medinas, thousands kabah, unesco heritage, gorges and landscaps until his long coasts from both sides medeteranien and atlantic ocean.

there are three routes to choose from. From Morocco, the Azores, or Senegal; the Cape Verde Islands, St. Paul Island, and Cayenne. Those are the routes most talked about at the start. They are favored because they are the farthest north and the most direct. I have a better, a least safer, idea.” “I’ll warrant you have, Dave, if it’s to be found,” declared Hiram. “What is it?” inquired Elmer. “The objection to those routes,” explained the young airman, “is that the water stretches are of wide extent. What I dread most is the fear of being caught away from land.” “Is there a shorter route than those you speak of?” asked Hiram. “Yes, there is,” asserted Dave. “What is it?” “Egypt, the Sahara Desert, the French Congo, Ascension Island, St. Helena, Trinidad, Rio Janeiro, and we are on American soil.” “Capital!” cried Hiram. “I wouldn’t lose an hour, Dave,” advised Elmer, with real anxiety. “Ever since we found out that there are two of the crowd ahead of us, it seems as if I’d be willing to sleep in the seat in the machine all the way to get ahead of them.” It was a warm, clear day when the Comet came to a rest at the city of Mayamlia, in French Congo. Looking back over the ten days consumed in making the run across Egypt, through Fezzan, the width of the great desert, over darkest Africa, and into the Soudan, the airship boys had viewed a country never before thus inspected by an aerial explorer. “Baked,