Jon Evans - Dark Places

Nobody said a word.

The two buses to Todra Gorge were big and air-conditioned and populated almost entirely by backpackers saving a buck by spending their night on a bus instead of in a hotel. I felt ill from all the cigarettes. The seats were faded and torn and only reclined back about ten degrees. I didn't feel as if I slept, but I must have, because once I thought I saw a big bald man at the front of our bus turn his head to stare at me, and it was Morgan. I shook myself and when I looked again there was no bald man there, just a Japanese couple.

We had a cigarette break by a gas station that was surrounded by a cedar forest. My watch told me it was two in the morning. The forest looked beautiful; no bushes or weeds, just a smooth carpet of grass beneath hundred-foot cedar trees, painted white and black by the bright moonlight, extending as far as the eye could see.

As we puffed away in front of our bus Lawrence climbed down and walked over to join us. We waited for him to make the inevitable comment about filthy disgusting habits.

Instead he said: "Give me one of those bloody things."

We stared at each other in shock.

"Lawrence," Nicole said, "have you ever smoked before?"

"Once," he said, taking a cigarette and a lighter from Steve. "I was eleven years old. I chundered," Anzac for 'threw up,' "like a champion." He gagged on the first puff. "Fucking things haven't gotten any better since," he coughed, but he kept at it. When he was three-quarters finished he stubbed it out and climbed back on the bus.

The four of us gaped at each other, speechless, before following him

I must have slept again after that, because the next thing I remembered was looking out the window and wondering where the stars were. Must be cloudy out there, I thought. Then I realized, probably not. We had left the green, fertile, Mediterranean climate of northwestern Morocco behind and now we were on the very edge of the Sahara Desert, a land of camels and scorpions, raw jagged desert scrubland where only the hardiest and thorniest bushes and weeds survived the baking sun and flash floods, where entire mountains were a smooth uniform colour unpunctuated by a single tree. Heavy cloud cover seemed unlikely.

I looked up further and saw a crescent moon hanging off the shoulder of a colossal mass of rock that swallowed up most of the sky. The cliff edge gleamed pale as death in the moonlight. We were there. Todra Gorge, a narrow crevice perhaps a hundred feet across at this point and a good five hundred feet high. I nudged Lawrence beside me and his eyes opened as if he really had been only resting his eyelids.

"We're there," I said.

"Oh happy day," he said, and closed his eyes again.

A few minutes later the bus rumbled and wheezed to a stop and after long minutes of confused disembarkation in the dark we pulled ourselves and our things together and signed into the Hotel des Roches, a grand old dilapidated place, all faded tile and crumbling paint. We signed in under false names, which was easy enough. The hotel staff dealt with us and the three others staying here as if we were the first group of travelers they had ever seen, even though they must have been accustomed to receiving a new crowd every morning.

We napped in our rooms until dawn and then we met in the common room for a quick breakfast of bread, omelettes, and mint tea. Lawrence turned down an offer of a cigarette. There were no jokes exchanged today. Morgan was due to arrive in Todra Gorge in twenty-four hours, on the same bus that had just taken us here. It was time we started talking about the gory details of the ugly mission that had brought us here. It was time for a council of war.

Todra Gorge runs for a good twenty miles, roughly east to west, a scar five hundred feet deep carved by the thin river which trickles down to the east. We were at the east and narrowest end, where a half-dozen hotels huddle in the shadow of a group of overhanging crags very popular with rock-climbers. About a half-mile beyond the hotels the river collects into a pond, and a shockingly green wedge of trees and farmland, home to maybe five hundred poor village farmers, sits amid a sea of red rock and blistering heat like a piece of Indonesia dropped into the desert. Between the hotels and the village a road switchbacks up a landslide scar to the top of the gorge, big enough for buses. When we had been here before the river was a good two feet deep where the hotels were, and the buses had to get up a head of steam before splashing through it. But that had been spring. Now it was autumn, and the river was only six inches at its deepest.

The gorge widened slightly and grew less precipitous as it climbed to the west. At the other end of the gorge was a youth hostel, and the adventure-traveler thing to do was to spend one day trekking up to the youth hostel, and the next trekking back, in the blistering heat of the desert sun. If you have to ask why then you will never understand. The trail followed the riverbed for some time, but then climbed up into the walls of the gorge. Sometimes the gorge widened, and you could climb from top to bottom without using your hands; but inevitably it narrowed again, sometimes for long stretches, where the rocky trail was littered with boulders, with a two-hundred-foot cliff to your right and a sheer two-hundred-foot drop to your left.

That was why I had selected it. In the back of my mind I had pictured it like this: we wait for Morgan behind a boulder, keeping an eye out with the binoculars; he arrives; we waylay him and throw him over the edge; and by the time the Moroccan police get around to investigating the death of another clumsy traveler, we are back in Gibraltar. I guess we'd all had it in the back of our minds. When I explained this to them they nodded as if I was stating the obvious.

"Sounds simple," Lawrence said. "Lot of things that could go wrong though."

"Right. What if he's made friends on the bus, like he did in Indonesia, and he comes up with a crowd?" Nicole asks.

"Or what if he decides it's too crowded and decides to explore the other way?" Lawrence suggested. "Or what if he's sick and doesn't even come here?"

"No battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy," Hallam quoted. "I think the real difficulty here is that we have to keep ourselves hidden. If he sees any of us, the gig might be up. That will make it more difficult than I'd like to stay aware of where he is."

"He might decide to take one of those extended camel treks into the desert instead of hiking up here," Lawrence said.

"Or what if he's taken up rock-climbing and he spends the whole day going up those overhangs down at this end?" Hallam asked.

"We should have thought about this more," Nicole said, shaking her head. "It seemed so simple in London, but now, I mean, no offense, Paul, but this isn't a plan, it's just a hope that he falls into our lap."

"I know," I said morosely. Hallam and Lawrence nodded. I didn't know what to do.

Steve cleared his throat noisily and we all turned to him.

"Christ," he said. "A sadder lot of wet blankets I've never seen. I reckon it's a bloody good plan. I reckon you lot are all forgetting a couple of points here."

"What's that?" I asked.

"Well," and here he switched to a Cockney accent, " basically — "

We all chuckled. It was a truck in-joke.

" basically, I reckon you're all forgetting that we're not dealing with any kind of mysterious unknown stranger here. It's Morgan. So one, I'm telling you, Morgan's going to come up that gorge. You think he's going to go exploring and kissing babies in that village the other way? Not bloody likely, I'll tell you that. And two, have you all forgotten just how bloody fast that man moves when he's got a will in him? He's fitter than I am, I don't mind admitting. He's not going to slow down for any bloody group of mates he met on the coach last night. Remember how he hated it when anybody slowed him down? He might say 'I'll save you a beer at the top' but I reckon that's the only concession there. And I reckon that's only in the case there's no beer shortage up there."