On a Bike and a Prayer
day 24. mad
We rose at 6.00am when Oman popped his head over the stair well. After breakfasting on bread and jam and a big pot of coffee my two sherpas left with enough bread, mackerel and cheese and biscuits for three days.
An hour later, I was ready to leave, hoping to rendez-vous with the others at a lake higher up. I cycled off with my water bag bouncing over my handlebars and my cameras bouncing on my back. Just up the road I found Stephane and Andrea re-packing their over-loaded day packs and weaving webbs of bungies around each other. It was simply not possible for them to carry so much and we decided to rent a mule in the next village.
We first met `Bill-argh' as we struggled past a new house he was building on the edge of town. His little weasely face looked us up and down and his one tainted tooth quivered with glee. He grabbed a load off us and beetled up the shady road to his cafe to negotiate a price. The 2000 Dh he originally asked for dropped swiftly to 200Dh and after a nod of agreement from us for the three days as a sherpa and guide for the south face of Toubkal, he disappeared inside the mud stained building to emerge two minutes later in a pair of broken slip-on-shoes, a pair of half-mast brown corduroy trousers and a short sleeve shirt. His luggage was a white plastic bag of two pieces of bread and a tin of sardines.
Armed thus, he put on both Andrea' s and Stephane's ruck
sacs, causing his neck to be bent double and his chin to rest on his chest - and
he was off up the rubbley path to Lake Ifni.
By the time I caught everyone up carrying my bike over the rubbley hair-pin bent track, the guide was having reservations about his impossible load. I left the other two to sort out a new deal involving a mule and plodded on up the cliff-like scree slope, bike over shoulder.
Convinced that a short steep track was less effort than a longer more gentle one, I plodded wearily up the vertical route to find myself trackless and in the midst of a desert of black burnt boulders, like a huge jumbled car park. By the time I'd carried the bike over this maze of crevasses I was at the south of the lake, with Stephane, Andrea, Bill and the mule a mile away on the far shore.
The huge crater which housed the lake acted as a vast
auditorium which carried our cries of `Where are you...are you OK?' like some
trans-Atlantic telephone call via geostationary satellite. Before we could
take the conversation much further, Bill had skipped like some winged goat round
the lake shore, built like some sea defence, and was guiding me over towards the
second rescue party - Stephane.
We ate lunch on the lake side mindful of our meagre provisions. Although Bill was keen that we shared his bread and sardines we could not at this stage spare any of our own food in exchange. We declined and he tucked into his crusty bread and sardine oil, washed down with the scummy water from the lake side which he slurped from a chewed plastic bottle he'd found on the way.
It was beyond my comprehension that a man dressed so inadequately could guide us without food up such inhospitable terrain. We pressed on in the afternoon across a gigantic beach of shingle over a mile long, from the lake to the Toubkal Gorge. As I bumped my bike over the rocks we passed a group of French trekkers heading down from Toubkal. They nodded but hardly acknowledged us as if we were pedestrians on the Champs Elysees - instead of adventurers at the base of North Africa's highest mountain.
From the edge of the shingle - the track climbed like some
never ending loft ladder up to the porphyry peaks of rich brown cones. The
peaks were a world away and scratching at the passing cumulo-nimbus and cirrus
clouds which flew in formation vapour trailing over the rocks. The perspective
was destroyed by the immensity of such structures and it was inconceivable to
imagine we could ever reach it by climbing alone - let alone carrying a bicycle!
My shoulders had been rubbed raw by the time I'd reached the lake, and so now I adopted the method of head through the frame - front wheel below and in front, rear wheel above and behind my head, seat tube resting across my shoulders, easing my crammed arms and swollen hands. It felt like a long march to my crucifixion as I plodded laboriously upwards, straining through the tubing to see where my feet were landing. If I stopped to look and think I could not go on - so I tried not to look upwards at where I had to climb - to the ridge 3000 feet more above my ant-like form.
The repetitive action of marching upwards hypnotised me into a dream, which removed the jarring of the bike on my collar bones. With the help of the other two I wrapped the polar fleece jacket around my neck and perched the bike upon this. This way, I found I could continue for 15-20 minutes without a rest. This interval shortened quickly though as we rose to the heavens and the path steepened to a single ladder which sapped my energy and my will to go on.
Since the others had decided not to take their bikes some days before, I had been reasoning why I should want to carry an assembled bike all the way up a 4000 metre mountain and then all the way down, with very little hope of being able to ride it in between. I resigned my need to do this to the contract with the College Expedition Board and the sponsors. Toubkal was not a difficult climb technically and would not tax me on its own. I had climbed worse and in worse conditions of humidity and cold. No - I needed an extra burden.
As the third hour of the bike balancing climb passed, I began to see the futility and pointlessness of my goals - but I refused to tell the others. `Why don't you just carry a sac of rocks up?' said Stephane, `It would be just as useful'.
My strength and stamina was ebbing away fast as we neared our bivouac site at just after 5.00pm. It was a large damp overhang on the north wall of the gorge, with some spartan vegetation for the mule in front. We found a dry corner to squeeze into at one side. Bill busied himself collecting brush for a fire and we squatted feeling sorry and cold and wondered where Bill was going to sleep in his T-shirt and broken shoes.
Stephane got some water boiling on his stove and we tucked into our dehydrated meals - dunking bread into bolognaise sauce. Bill squatted like some sick canary perched on a rock - watching us feast with contempt. We gave him some bread and cheese which he munched discontentedly. He spoke barley any French and a strange Berber dialect which made all conversation very difficult. When ever you gave him anything he said `Oui' and ate it - his single yellow tooth working over time. When he chewed his whole crew-cut, bony head moved stiffly, joining in to help the tooth. He looked like a cartoon rodent freshly emerged from hibernation with sunken eyes nibbling on his first meal.
We made him some tea to follow. He guzzled this down, and then quickly checked the time we wanted to start in the morning. `Sept heurs' - he seemed to understand and then he was gone into the night with the singing of scree cascading downwards after his broken shoes.
The night was long and chilly and lumpy on our slope in the cave. Goats and sheep trickled past in the dusk, setting off rock falls. Passing shepherds sang sad echoing songs and their wolf like wild dogs serenaded them in this vast bottomless echo-chamber that was our home.
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