A Day in the Atlas

We leave Marrakech at six thirty. The city is still half-asleep, the medina just beginning to stir. Our driver, Mustapha, who has worked with us for years, has the windows down and a flask of coffee on the dashboard. He nods at the guard at the riad door, who waves us through into the cool blue of the early morning.

Within twenty minutes the city is gone. The road south runs flat for a while, through dusty outskirts and roadside cafés already serving mint tea to the men who run them. Then, slowly, the land begins to lift.

Imlil

Imlil is a village at the foot of Toubkal, the highest peak in North Africa. By car it is perhaps ninety minutes from Marrakech. By feeling it is several centuries. The valley opens beneath you as you climb, terraced fields of walnut and apple trees, the river running silver below, and beyond it all the mountains, vast and quiet and indifferent.

We park where the road ends and walk the rest of the way. There is a path that climbs gently from the village up through the orchards, past a small mosque whose minaret is barely taller than the trees around it. After thirty minutes we arrive at a Berber home, simple and low-slung, with goats in the courtyard and a view that stops you mid-sentence.

There is a difference between visiting a place and being received by it. Imlil is the latter.

Tea, and what it teaches

Khadija, who lives in the house, is expecting us. We sit on cushions on the floor of the main room. She brings tea on a silver tray and pours it from a height, three times, the way her grandmother taught her. The first cup is bitter, she explains, like life. The second is strong, like love. The third is sweet, like death. You drink all three.

We do not rush. There is no schedule for an afternoon like this. Khadija tells us about her sons, both of whom work in Marrakech now. She asks about ours. The light moves across the floor. Outside, the sound of a single goat bell. It is, for an hour, the entire world.

Lunch under the olives

Down the valley, a little further from the village, is a guesthouse run by a friend of ours called Omar. He has a long wooden table set in the shade of an olive grove, and on it a feast that has clearly been waiting hours. Salads of grilled aubergine and tomato. Slow-cooked lamb that falls off the bone. Bread still warm from the clay oven. A bowl of fresh apricots from the tree above us.

We eat for two hours. Slowly. Nobody checks a phone. Omar tells us about the new road being built up the valley, what it will mean for his guesthouse, what it will mean for the village. The conversation drifts, as good conversations do, into a hundred other things.

The road back

We leave Imlil in the late afternoon. The light on the way down is different from the light on the way up — warmer, longer, the colour of saffron. Mustapha takes the slower road, which winds through three small villages we did not see on the way out. In one of them there is a roadside market just packing up, and we stop for ten minutes to buy a kilo of figs and a small jar of honey from a man who insists, smiling, that we taste a spoonful first.

By the time we are back in Marrakech, the call to prayer is going up from the mosques and the medina is alive again. The day in the Atlas already feels like a long time ago, and at the same time, like the only thing that happened this week.

This is what we love about Morocco. The country can change you in an afternoon if you let it.