Trek Morocco Day 5- Tabarkhacht- Kelaà M’Gouna-8 klms
The last day and only two hours hike, but it seems a lot longer and harder, as if the dust on me is turning into clay. We pass some kasbahs and small villages. In one, I find the brick homes of the Jewish quarter, laying desolate and ruined from the time of their exodus in the 16 century. Today, the Jewish population in Morocco numbers only around 5200 people (Wikipedia, 2010).
I have learned much from this trek and encounters with the Berber tribes. I hope to learn more, especially about their relationship with and care of The Source-the water that is either life or death in these parts and increasingly elsewhere.
The heat is searing, making my own departure difficult. There is something awe-inspiring about the place or space that I am walking away from. Something soulful, harsh and sublime at the same time that permeates through me and draws me back. The space, the silence and the peace.
I have not read a better discription of this encounter than in the last two stanzas of Australian poet, A.D. Hope’s ``Australia’’. It is a fitting place to end this trek. These red parched hills and the tribes that still roam them, could well be a mirror of that Land Downunder :
`Yet there are some like me turn gladly home
From the lush jungle of modern thought, to find
The Arabian desert of the human mind,
Hoping, if still from the deserts the prophets come,
Such savage and scarlet as no green hills dare
Springs in that waste, some spirit which escapes
The learned doubt, the chatter of cultured apes
Which is called civilisation over there`
http://johnwatsonsite.com/MyClassNotes/Topics/Poetry/Australia%20AD%20Hope.html
Epilogue
We re-enter the village of my guide. The occasional villager greets me like a local, which my guide finds amusing and tells me that it is a good sign. After lunch with the whole family, he kisses me twice on each cheek, as is the custom of these people. He solemly calls me `friend’, and tells me I am welcome any time in his home. I wish him well, hoping that `La Source’ that is all life, stays with him, his family and his tribe.
`Que La Source soit avec toi’
RECOMMENDATIONS:
`Les Berbères: Memoire et identité (Gabriel Camps, Babel 2007)
`Morocco' (Lonely Planet)
`Festival of the roses' Annually early May, in the vallee des roses, covered in pink Persian roses
`Essaouira Int. World Music Festival' on the SW Atlantic coast