Hammond Innes - The Strange Land

‘How do you mean?’ I asked, too surprised at his question to express the annoyance I had felt at finding him back here in the hotel ahead of me when I’d been getting worried and searching all through the souks.

‘When we got separated by those beggars, he wouldn’t go back for you,’ he said. ‘He insisted you’d cut down one of the side alleys. We went through it and came out into the brass market. But you weren’t there and he got very excited, jabbering away at me in Arab, and led me into a maze of streets so that I didn’t know where I was. All I knew was that he was leading me deeper and deeper into the souks.’

‘Well, at least he brought you back,’ I said, sinking into a chair.

‘He certainly didn’t. I had to find my own way back.’

I stared at him. ‘Do you mean to say the boy just left you?’

‘Well, not quite. It was really the other way round. I left him.’

‘Where?’

‘It was in an alley full of those gold-embroidered slippers. He kept on trying to drag me along the whole length of it. But by then I knew the only sensible thing was to come back to the hotel. I told him that and he tried to convince me the best way back was straight down that alley. I knew it wasn’t. That way we should have been going against the crowd and I was certain they were making for the Djemaa el Fna.’

‘And the boy left you to make your own way?’

‘He came a little way with me. Then he gave it up.’

‘But I’ve just seen him outside the hotel.’

Jan shrugged his shoulders. ‘Then he must have followed me, that’s all.’

‘You’re certain he was trying to lead you the wrong way?’

‘Yes, I’m pretty certain. I always have a shrewd idea where I am in a strange city.’ He hesitated and then said, ‘There’s another thing, too. The room has been searched whilst we’ve been out.’

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake!’ I said. I felt tired. ‘How do you know?’

‘The hasps of my case were undone. I didn’t leave them like that. And when I got here, the Arab porter couldn’t find the key. He was gone about five minutes before he produced it.’ He was wrought up about it, his nerves on edge.

I pulled myself to my feet and examined my case. As far as I could tell everything was just as I’d left it. ‘Let’s go down and have some food,’ I said.

He stared at me angrily for a moment and then he turned away. ‘Perhaps you’re right.’ But he said it without conviction.

However, he seemed to relax in the warmth of the restaurant, and next day, after a long night’s sleep, he was quite a different person. In fact, he was almost exuberant when we were finally seated in the Enfida bus, packed in like sardines amongst a crowd of Berber men returning from a night out in the great city. He talked excitedly, asking questions, and when we drove out past the traceried gateway of the Bab Aguenaou on to the road that runs out into the flat plain, he sat quite still without talking, staring at the mountains. Behind us Marrakech, with its nine kilometres of red mud walls and its flat-roofed houses dotted with storks’ nests, lay sprawled out in the clear morning sunlight, a sleepy pattern of red and brown and white.

I didn’t talk to him on that two-hour journey out to Enfida.

I thought if I didn’t talk, maybe he’d find it easier to adjust himself to his new surroundings. Also, I had my own problems. I hadn’t given much thought to the Mission whilst I had been in Tangier. Now I needed to plan. There was the surgery to organise and people I wanted to see — people who had been sick or had suffered some misfortune like Yakoub at the olive factory who had lost his little son. And Jan would have to be introduced to Frehel, the Civil Controller, and to the Caid, and then I’d have to take him on a tour of the villages. I had hardly got all these matters sorted out in my mind before the bus was climbing up out of the plain to the fringe of the foothills and we had come to the first of the olive plantations.

Everything looked very wet. There were pools of water steaming in the sunshine and the roadway itself was creamed with mud. ‘There’s been a lot of rain up here,’ Jan said.

I nodded, remembering the paper I had picked up in Jose’s bar. It seemed ages ago. I wondered whether it could have snowed here.

‘Have you had somebody looking after the Mission whilst you’ve been away?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Two English people — a painter named George Corrigan and his sister, Julie. I think you’ll like them. They run an old single-decker bus which they converted into a caravan. They’ve been touring Morocco in it.’

‘Do they know the south at all?’

‘Still thinking about Kasbah Foum?’ I said. And then, because my tone had sounded angry, I added, ‘If anybody knows it, they will. They’ve been all over the country. For all I know, George may have done a painting of it. One room of the Mission is stacked with his paintings. There are a lot of kasbahs amongst them.’

We had turned up into Enfida now and a moment later we drew up at the bus stop behind a truck piled high with a load of black olives going down to the press. There was a little crowd standing in the mud waiting for the bus and the rushing sound of the river flooding under the bridge filled the town.

Yakoub, the man who had lost his little son, was standing talking to the driver of the olive truck, his woolly cap and ragged djellaba black and stiff with the rancid oil of the press.

‘Salaam ealykum!’ I called to him, but he didn’t answer. And when I went up to him, he seemed ill-at-ease and refused to look me in the face. ‘What’s the trouble?’ I asked him.

He moved his shoulders awkwardly and mumbled something about the wrath of Allah being terrible.

‘What is it?’ I said. ‘What’s happened?’

‘It is the mountain, sidi,’ he murmured. ‘It has fallen into the valley. It has fallen upon the Dar el Mish’n.’

‘What’s he saying?’ Jan asked me.

‘Something about the Mission.’ Yakoub had turned away now. The people by the bus were all standing watching me. ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘We’d better get up there right away.’ And we began walking up towards the open space by the Auberge de la Ravine, where the track into the mountains started. There was something about the atmosphere of the place and the way the people stood silently watching us that scared me. The air was heavy with the humid heat of mud steaming in the sunshine and the river roared in a brown flood under the bridge. And in the place of olives outside the auberge, the drivers of the asses and the men who bent over the scales stopped and stared, and when I spoke to them they were silent as though they had been struck dumb. A feeling of disaster hung over the place.

We came out above the olive trees on to the hillside and everything looked quiet and peaceful in the midday sun. The mountains were a massive line of white shouldering up into the blue sky and the air was still and calm and crystal-clear. Down below us the river wound through the valley, a turgid, brown flood of water, and the only sound was the persistent braying of a donkey. The slope of the ground ahead screened the Mission, but soon I could see the creamy white of the Corrigans’ caravan parked in an olive grove down to the left and then I breasted a rise and all the hillside above the Mission came suddenly into view, and I stopped.

Above — the road there was a great, raw gash of newly-exposed rock and rubble. It ran from the very top of the sheer hill-slope, broadening out as it swept down, and disappeared beyond the next rise of the road. I stood there, my chest heaving, my whole body suddenly paralysed at what I saw. It was a landslide, and I was rooted to the spot by fear of what I should find when I topped the final rise.