Tom Foran Clark

A fight broke out almost immediately at the head of the bus. It was a fiery quarrel. Tempers flared, harsh accusations flew. The driver, unperturbed, just drove on. There was a moment, when push came to shove, that the bus seemed doomed -- they would all be pitched off the road into a ditch. Emery closed his eyes.

The bus arrived in Fez at dusk. Outside arose a clamor -- shrill whistles, shouts, and clapping hands. The fight at the front of the bus had caught fire once more. People looking in at them through the smeared and foggy windows were cheering and rooting. Having pulled to a halt, the driver grabbed the two worst offenders by their shirt or robe collars, led them to the exit doors, and threw them out. The fight went on, alongside the bus. Total strangers began throwing in their lot with one side or the other. Soon mayhem broke out. Cautiously, Emery disembarked. Atop the bus, two men threw down bags, sacks, baskets, and livestock. Emery got hit by a few random projectiles and suitcases, then caught his own tossed rucksack mid-flight.

Encircling were high gray crags, eroded cliffs, and emerald knolls. Whistling, Emery ventured into Fez. The mosque and minaret rose up like gems from the surrounding dust. He went straight to the Medina and took a room at the Hotel El-Hilal. He quickly fell asleep.

In the morning, under cloudy skies, Emery explored the clamorous honeycomb of souks -- pits, carpets, garments, diadems, porphyry, smoke -- and got coffee, breakfast, and a haircut and a shave. In the barbershop he met a Frenchman from Toulouse, Jacques, who gave him a lift out of town in his cherry-red Vauxhall "Bedford" van, re-fitted and vamped up for camping trips -- a mobile bungalow. He said he could take Emery as far as high Azrou, where snow was falling hard. Before they ever got there, they took a wrong turn and arrived at the ski slopes of Mischliffin. The ski lodges of Mischliffin were deserted. They turned back in just about zero visibility in search of the crossroads again, to get back on the road to Azrou. They passed through dense white cedar forests and arrived at the Rock of Azrou, where Jacques saw to it that Emery got a room at the Hotel des Cedres before he disappeared into the blizzard in his Vauxhall on his own again.

Emery was in his warm room lying on the bed idly listening to the storm whirling and gnashing just outside the window, when a dazzling Arab girl like a wild black stallion flung open his door and walked in, laughing. She’d presumed the room would be empty. She insisted she just needed to get some extra shot glasses she knew were in the room and then she’d leave. And it was so. There were four of these, just out of sight on the top shelf inside a closet. Leaving, she invited Emery to join her and some friends in her room, where they were having a party. Emery went over.

They were from Rabat -- students from the Institute Agronomique et Vetinairie Hassan II. Khadija, Omar, Hamid, Ali, and Hassan were buoyant, celebrating their spring break. The room was filled with smoke. Khadija served tea. Hamid put a cassette in a player and we all linked arms and danced. At midnight, Hassan hastily steered Emery back to his room and, in the morning, when Emery went to see if he could join them all downstairs for breakfast, he learned that only Ali remained. The others had checked out of the hotel at dawn. Though the sun had only been out for an hour, already melting snow was dripping from the eaves around the hotel.

After a continental style breakfast in the dining room, Ali took Emery out to tell him more about the region. Ali was familiar with Azrou which, in Arabic, meant "the Rock." The town was on a kind of island bluff that rose only slightly from the plateau. It was too small to be called "a hill" and too large to be called "an enormous pile of boulders," so some ancient tribe or other had decided on "the Rock," Azrou. The two hiked across rolling stretches of brittle shale, then sat on a boulder. Ali now took out a book, in English, called Mister Rumpleash. He began reading aloud.

"What means ‘stern taskmaster’?" Ali asked, and Emery explained. When Ali asked him, "If Mister Rumpleash is thinking to be firing his clerk, how is the clerk then getting to have a raise?" Emery said he didn’t know. He had a closer look at the book and told Ali what he supposed was going on. Then they closed the book and Ali asked Emery to teach him a song. Of course Emery did his best rendition of "I’ve Been Working on the Railroad" and that went over very well. Emery taught him the words and then went for "Row, Row, Row Your Boat." They didn’t get back to the hotel until sundown.

Back at the Hotel des Cedres, Ali bid Emery adieu, as he’d be leaving for Rabat very early the next morning. He gave Emery his address at the Institute Agronomique et Vetinairie Hassan II and made him promise that if he ever got to Rabat, he would look up Ali and his friends Omar, Hassan, Hamid, and Khadija.

Emery got off the rock of Azrou in the morning and, under clear blue skies, walked down the road toward Khenifra whistling "Row, Row, Row Your Boat" and "I’ve Been Working on the Railroad." He flagged down the first car he saw, a tan and golden Renault sedan carrying a family of Parisians. At the wheel was the father, a silver-haired businessman showing his wife and teenage daughter the territory he’d been assigned to as a young French soldier in Morocco in the years 1947 and ‘48.

He got in the back seat with the daughter and the mother handed back a parcel of old photographs -- black-and-white snapshots of the former ambulance driver and his comrades. "Those were those days," the Parisian father said in English for Emery's benefit, pointing out the empty expanses. "C’est la vie," he reminisced, sighing. "Those were those days." They wound through jumbled mountains, green and gray, to Mirirt, a tiny village at the foot of the Moyen Atlas, and on to the red-clay village of Khenifra, circled by burned red earth and shimmering fields of grass and red poppies, where Emery was let out. The Parisians were going on to El-Ksiba, but Emery was bound for Beni-Mellal.

Emery walked on. A Renault convertible now pulled roadside, dark blue and with the top down. The driver was a talkative handsome young guy in a dark brown suit, wearing sunglasses. He’d been taking evening classes in English and was thrilled to be conversing with Emery. He was on his way to Beni-Mellal and Khouribga. The region around Khouribga was loaded with phosphates, he-- Abdul -- explained. Abdul was working for a huge phosphates company that was paying him enormous amounts of money, he said. He was just now returning to Khouribga from Ech-Chelkh, his childhood home, where he was building a house. He said he was building it now, but would not be living in it yet -- not for years to come. "I am not living in it until I am old and retiring and very rich."

Beni-Mellal was a city piled upon a shelf along the side of a lofty snow-capped mountain. From its upper berths you could see far across the vast green plains. Abdul personally saw to it that Emery was checked into a room at the Hotel Renard -- at his expense. He also treated Emery to his favorite soup, a fiery pepper and tomato concoction, at the Restaurant de Rif. He stuffed many dirhams into a pocket of Emery's rucksack when he departed, insisting he go get himself a nice suit and hat -- and new sunglasses. "That’s the way to live!" Abdul called out, putting on his shades (despite its being pink sundown now, with gray-blue clouds piling up low along the line of the horizon). He started up his convertible Renault with a roar, kicking up dust as he sped toward money-bleeding Khouribga, somewhere on that phosphate plain.

In the morning, after coffee and rolls at the Restaurant de Rif, Emery decided against buying a suit, setting aside Abdul’s money for some future opportunity of suit buying or down-payment on a house, and caught a ride out of Beni-Mellal on the back of a mo-ped. This benefactor, wearing city garb, a beret, and goggles, took Emery through pastures, olive orchards, and farm fields to a crossroads where he was no sooner let off than he got a lift in the back of a white Peugot pick-up truck that carried him all the way to the Nid de Cigogne, and the outskirts of Marrakech.

Emery was brought into Marrakech proper in a silver Mercedes-Benz sedan driven by a ruddy-cheeked, blonde entrepreneur from California wearing a nicely pressed white shirt and rumpled blue jeans. Skip Gallagher told Emery how, seven years before, he’d come to Morocco from Redondo Beach by way of the Caribbean. He’d first entered Morocco from Spain, arriving in the northern mountains of the Rif in a battered Volkswagen van and "two dollars and a cassette deck." He’d traded the tape player and some cassettes for one-hundred grams of hashish and "I was in business, running hash down from the Rif to the vagabond beachcombers of Tarazu Beach, just north of Agadir. The affluent loafers of Tarazu paid me handsomely," Skip admitted, "through three years." He’d then gone back to the Caribbean, where he’d himself been an idle beachcomber, and invested in a charter-boat business that became, as he put it, "spectacularly successful." Now he was back in Morocco, going forward with "still bigger plans." He apologized for being unable to divulge just what he had in mind.

"So, Rich, what brings you to Morocco? -- I can call you Rich?"

Emery nodded. He didn’t know where to start. Emery told him a little of his travels and how he and Pike had met, and got separated, and how Emery had come to Marrakech to find out what had happened to Pike. Emery felt bad, laying down this awful hard luck story on this very winning, optimistic personality.

Even as Marrakech came into view, rising up out of the grain and palms flatlands before snowcapped Himalayan-like mountains, the Lower Atlas, Skip seemed to make light of Emery's predicament, saying, "Well, I’ll tell you Rich, I seem to have the Midas Touch. I’m here in Marrakech, the Imperial City, to bring it all together," he rejoiced. "And I have this feeling my meeting you isn’t just coincidence. I’m gonna help you find out what happened to your pal Spike, and not only that. Man, I am gonna open up your eyes to a Morocco you never imagined, even in your wildest dreams! Rich, buddy, this is your lucky day."