‘How do you mean?’
‘I think, if he had got the deeds, he would have gone straight to Kasbah Foum. When he discovered I wouldn’t sell, he tried to persuade me to go into some sort of partnership with him. He said there was money in it. I think he knew about the possibilities of silver. Right up to the end I think he believed that when we reached Tangier I would agree to his proposition. I didn’t discourage him. I wanted that passage out and I didn’t trust him. If I had definitely refused…’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Anyway, it doesn’t matter now.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘It’s time we went on.’ He said it almost brusquely, as though he didn’t want to think about what had happened on the boat.
The road ran gently down the valley of the Imini and emerged on to an arid, stony plain. The mountains dropped behind until I could see them in the mirror as a long, brown wall topped with snow. I was driving. The others were asleep — Julie in her own compartment at the back of the caravan, Jan sprawled out on the berth behind me. I was alone at the wheel with the road reeling out ahead of me and the blazing sun and the blue sky and the parched earth stretching brown to the horizon — just the two colours, blue and brown, and the grey ribbon of the road. I had an odd sense of space coming down out of the mountains. It was as though I could feel by the lie of the land that the way was open to the south. Ahead were the humped shapes of a range of low, dark hills. Beyond them was the Sahara.
It was strange and a little frightening. This was the most recently conquered part of Morocco. Barely twenty years ago Marshal Lyautey and his troops had still been fighting there. The whole area was run by the military — by Les Officiers des Affaires Indigenes. There were few Europeans and until quite recently it had been known as the Zone of Insecurity.
We passed the turning to the manganese mines of Imini and then we were running through Amerzgane and El Mdint. The white kasbah of Tifoultout stood like a fairy castle on a little rise on the far side of the river and after that the road was straight and tree-lined, ending abruptly in a hill with a fort on it. We were driving into Ouarzazate. The town was largely French, a single street pushed between two small hills. On the right was the Military Post. The road leading up to it was signposted territoire. And then I saw a second signpost — gite d’etapes. I turned up a sharp hill, climbing to a long, low building with a tower built like a kasbah.
‘Why have you turned up here?’ Jan asked, roused from his sleep by the change in the engine note.
‘I want to phone Frehel,’ I said. ‘Also, your friend Ed White stayed here.’
I told him about the telephone number noted down at the back of Wade’s log as we went into the hotel. The place was centrally heated and very warm. Beyond the reception desk was a bar and on either side were two big glass cabinets, one displaying Berber jewellery — silver bangles and coin headdresses, blanket pins and long necklaces of intricately-worked silver and beads — the other filled with specimens of minerals found locally. A French officer seated at a table reading a magazine glanced at us idly. Then Madame appeared and I asked her whether she knew a Mr White.
‘Mais oui, monsieur. An American. He has stayed here several times.’
‘On holiday?’ I asked.
‘En vacance? Non, non, monsieur. He is a prospector.’
‘A prospector!’ Jan’s voice was suddenly interested.
‘Is this Monsieur’s first visit to Ouarzazate?’ Madame asked. And when Jan nodded, she said, ‘Ah, well then, you must understand that all this country south of here is very rich in minerals. We have many prospectors who stay — ‘
‘Is he staying here now, madame?’ Jan asked her.
‘Monsieur White? NoŤ, monsieur. He has not been here for several weeks now.’
‘Do you know where he is?’
‘Un moment.’ She went behind the desk and picked up a notebook, running her finger down the passages. ‘Ah, oui. He left instructions for us to forward his letters to the office of Monsieur le Capitaine at the Military Post of Foum-Skhira.’
So, Ed White was at Kasbah Foum!
‘I suppose he didn’t say what he was prospecting for?‘Jan asked.
‘Non, non.’ Madame laughed. ‘Prospectors do not talk about what they are searching for. But probably it is uranium.’ She shrugged her shoulders. ‘Always they dream of uranium now.’
‘Did a Monsieur Kostos stay here last night or the night before?’ I asked her.
‘Non, monsieur.’
I phoned Frehel then and told him where he could find us. And whilst I was doing that, Jan wrote a note for his wife. He left it with Madame and we went back to the bus, driving out of Ouarzazate by a road that forded the river not far from the great Kasbah of Taourirt. Everything was very still in the sunlight and as the wheels splashed and bumped over the stones of the river bed, we could see the kasbah reflected in the water. It was a completely walled town, crowding up out of the palmerie in tower after tower, standing out against the blue of the sky like a part of the desert country in which it was built.
And then we were clear of the water and climbing the narrow, ploughed-up surface of the piste, climbing up through a long valley that led into the foothills of the Anti-Atlas. All about us were dark, sombre hills, shadowed by the stones that littered their slopes, closing up behind us and hemming us in so that we could no longer see the clean, white wall of the High Atlas. A little wind rose and drifted dust between the stones. Gaunt skeletons of heath and tamarisk marked out the drainage courses in dusty green.
‘Marcel called this country Le Pays Noir,’ Jan murmured. ‘He said it was geologically much older than the High Atlas and full of undeveloped mineral resources.’ He was dreaming of Kasbah Foum again.
All afternoon we struggled through those dark, satanic hills. Dust seeped up through the floorboards in choking clouds from the fine-ground powder of the piste. It got in our clothes and in our nostrils. It powdered our hair grey. Once a jeep passed us, and for an hour after that we caught glimpses of it, a little cloud of dust far ahead. We climbed steadily upwards and then dropped down to a rocky basin in which a lonely kasbah stood subsisting on a few dusty palms and the herds of black goats that roamed the stunted vegetation. After that we climbed again, up a steep escarpment to a lonely watch tower and the pass of Tizi N Tinififft, more than five thousand feet up. Here we were in a land of sudden deep gorges, dark in shadow, that descended in shelves of rock. For an hour we wound round the tops of these gorges until, as the sun set, we came out on to a hill-top, and far below us saw the Draa Valley, a green ribbon of palm trees. And there, on a little hill, was the Military Post of Agdz.
We had a meal then and slept, and at two in the morning we drove through the sleeping Post of Agdz and down the valley of the Draa. The piste was white and ground as fine as talcum powder. It followed the line of the river, winding along the edge of the palmerie, past kasbah after kasbah, and in every open space the kasbah cemeteries showed as patches of desert littered with small, upended stones, mute testimony to the countless thousands who had lived and died here over the centuries. We came at length to a fork: a little-used piste turning off to the right and running south over low hills. There was no signpost, but we took it, relying on the map.
Julie was driving again. I could see her face in the light from the dashboard; an intent, serious, competent face. Her black hair was grey with dust, her eyes narrowed as they peered ahead along the beam of the headlights. The stony, desert country ground past us, always the same — an unchanging yellow in the lights, and then suddenly black as it disappeared behind us. Her hands were brown and slender on the dusty ebony of the wheel and every now and then she beat at her knees to restore her circulation. A bitter wind blew in through the chinks in the windscreen, but our feet were warm in the heat of the engine, which came up from the floorboards with a musty smell of dust mixed with engine oil.