On a Bike and a Prayer
day 25. so hear and yet so far
Dawn after 6.00am couldn't have arrived soon enough. I woke wanting to be crucified on my bike frame rather than carry it up another 3000 feet to Toubkal's summit. It was still bitterly cold in our shady gorge and the black and white of shade chilled the rocks and all that chose to live on them. Like lizards before dawn we were sluggish to pack up and more sluggish to eat our cold breakfast of bread and jam.
Bill arrived at four minutes to seven, without a watch, and totally unaware of the time, to the point of being blasé about his punctuality.
I left the others to pack and went to retrieve my crucifix,
which I laughingly called a bicycle, from under a rock near by. The start of
the climb was slow again, my legs were numbed and cramped from a night in the
lumpy cave and I was not getting any satisfaction from my toil. The wall above
me seemed higher still and so impenetrable. My urge to climb Toubkal was
failing me - it suddenly seemed a pointless exercise and one I had no will to do
any more.
It was an hour before the others caught me - Bill blowing past with all the bags, mats and sleeping bags and a child like urge to show us all Toubkal; his mountain like a piece of work he had proudly finished only moments before.
The gorge walls tightened to a spout of chilly grey rocks shattered by a millennium of frost and fire. Black rain clouds brewed and squirmed across the tops like racing juggernauts and a harsh wind numbed already senseless hands and cut through our cotton trousers. We were not prepared for such meteorological adversity.
The path finally spluttered to death with a scree choked pile and Bill sitting amidst the luggage shivering like a sick old person. I wrapped him in my orange cycling cape and his toothless grin popped out through the head hole chattering from the cutting wind. We dumped all the luggage and I gladly left the bike with it. The last day and a bit of struggling under the bike had sapped everything I had and it was all I could do now to reach the ridge above at 4000 metres. The wind gusted in long sharp thrusts of pain as we climbed for another hour up shear faces and across precarious stone shoots.
The north side of the ridge provided our first close views
of Toubkals hulk and a respite from the
draining tearing of the wind. From
this sheltered position Toubkal was so close - the survey triangulation point
could clearly be seen. But despite it's closeness we were all drained and
mindful of the long treacherous descent - still carrying the bike, which lay
ahead.
The storm clouds brewed and rushed over us, an arms length away and the vicious wind persisted. Although in sight - the summit was another two hours away - our clothing was inadequate and rain or snow would have been the end. The guide sat shivering beneath my orange cape. Bill had always been ahead like a bounding, bouncing cartoon Tiger - running up the face and clambering down, back to us. Undeterred by the enormity and danger of the task which lay ahead, he had hopped up and down with glee - pointing and shouting Toubkal when we reached the ridge.
We explained in sign language that we would take some pictures from here, and head back. For the first time in my life, I was content to watch a summit 200 metres above me and two miles away and not needing to reach it. The urge to climb had left me.
We were back in Imhilene by 5.30pm, having only managed to cycle the last two kilometres, just beating the others by minutes. We had planned to last three days in the mountains. Returning on day two, Bill invited us to his house above the cafe for a couscous. We were taken, exhausted to a room carpeted in walnuts. Bill set to sweeping them up with his cashew nut oil-blackened hands.
We unrolled mats and bags and lay breathless and looking out at the view. One wall of the room was absent at the top and gave out onto the green valley wall spawning the same Berber precipice villages as elsewhere. A streak of white water cut down through the green as if painted in oil brush strokes. As the colours in the picture receded with the sun shine we settled down to a thick omelette and as much tea as we could drink.
We had climbed one Ben Nevis and descended two since leaving the cave at 7.00am this morning. I was disappointed at not succeeding at Toubkal, but I was glad to have carried the bike as far as I did. I snuggled down in my sleeping bag to be woken a few minutes later with a steaming couscous - crowned with the twisted small intestine of some animal, oozing fat. The cracked wheat was soaked in some animal stock which permeated everything.
Outside our bedroom around a little courtyard, the children played with balloons and inflated them until blue in the face, then releasing them to rush madly round the square - landing on women making flour and cheese. Bill sat proudly amidst this mayhem in the house that he'd built at the base of his mountain.
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