On a Bike and a Prayer
day 6. lord of the flies.
The night was cold and damp and we woke soaked in dew to a fierce sun. With just apples for breakfast the going was slow and a weak tingling feeling overwhelmed our legs. A little Berber shepherd boy gave chase hobbling like a cripple. When we stopped he proudly brandished a pussy, swollen toe which he'd stubbed on a rock three days before. It was the iodine that we splashed on which impressed him most, and when we covered this with a bandage, he was not pleased.
Round the corner lay Tirhibout - a leafy chicken-child scattered glade with gushing clear waters. We filled our bags, and tried to converse with a wrinkled blind man lying silently under a tree. In French and via the squawking children I asked "Why are you lying here?"
"Sometimes I feel happy and sometimes sad," he replied.
"Today I'm sad".
I told him that we felt sad sometimes as well, but today he was lucky because he could sit in the shade and we had to cycle in the heat. He replied that he didn't think he could trust Frenchmen and he refused to believe that I wasn't French. With that he hit me across the legs with a few twigs he was carrying and rolled over back to his depression.
We carried on along the way to A‹t-e-Rhazi across a bend in the river and were invited into a rickety house on the far bank. There were two brothers helping to build the wall outside. They took us up to a bedroom. It was dark and infested by every fly in Morocco. The itching insects scampered over the bread and scuttled round the glasses. The walls were artfully decorated with fading torn fashion pictures from once glossy American magazines.
The Berber picked up the tea pot and chuckling like a Tibetan as he sucked the spout clean and then poured the luke warm sweet mint tea onto the flies in the glasses. Brushing a mat of black flies from the flat bread on the ground he broke it into pieces and gestured to us. We smiled and picked politely at the inside of the crusty bread, whilst slurping the mint tea through our teeth to filter the flies.
After five minutes the second brother arrived returned with an orange bowl of oil looking as though it had just been drained from the sump of his tractor. Andrea and I politely dunked the fly-encrusted bread into the engine oil whilst Stephane made small talk. There were eight in the family and most popped in to see us during the next thirty minutes.
By 2.00pm we'd excused yourselves and gave him a picture of a red sports car from Stephane's financial magazine for his wall. We plodded on up the stony track and into a strengthening wind.
It was a draining gushing blow and with our diet of apples,
bread, engine oil and flies our legs were protesting at being asked to ride
on. Our rhythm ceased to beat and we lost all momentum and will to ride as the
scenery around grew flatter and more wind swept. They was no sign of life, let
alone a village or a shop.
A‹t-Taddert was a little cluster of buff lego-brick dwellings squashed into an ochre dust bowl below a heavy 4 o'clock sky. Two men sat on the edge of town, waiting for a lorry lift, but when we passed they invited us into the little community. There were over two hundred children waiting for us when we free-wheeled into the village courtyard. We were ushered into a pre-fabricated class room on the right. The two men were builders, in the process of building the school and living quarters for four new teachers from Rich.
The school room was damp and hot and flies again blanketed the windows. The little desks were all huddled together at one end as make-shift beds for the builders. Improvised toys made from household rubbish - yogurt cartons, syringes and batteries - lay strewn along a line of desks at the back.
A Calor gas stove was summoned and a chef arrived with eggs and bread. The crowd outside grew and grew until they were clustered round the doors and hanging from the windows. They ebbed and flowed as a large Berber man dressed in white periodically shewed them away.
As the omelette sizzled a twelve month old baby was eventually bought to us for treatment. Flies squirmed in her eyes and her hair was gone. She'd had diarrhoea for two months and her little pink face was drained and hollow. Stephane dug out some strong tablets and I made a Dyrolyte electrolyte meal. We gave them a supply of Dirolyte sachets but there was little more we could do.
We had been drained by the wind and lack of food, and we could not help ourselves as we fought with forks to guzzle the bread and omelette down. Bloated by tea we enquired about our destination for that day - Outerbate.
The wind howled and gushed into our faces as we fought our
way across the roller-coaster road for the next hour. The cafe in one street Outerbate happened to have a spare store room we could stay in. It was unlit
and dark and the clay walls were pitted and scared. Old food bones and chewed
carcases lay on the mauled matting and cobwebs, swayed bulging from the
ceiling. The room downstairs was full of men playing cards - it was smoky and
darker than the bedroom. The corners and crannies were piled high with sacks
and bric-a-brac which shock like thunderous kettle drums when rats played on it.
The shop a few doors away was open and we stocked up on bread, sardines, and biscuits. Supper was a feast as we clamoured to replace the lost energy in a big circle with some locals - the shop owner, a pharmacist, and the village Major.
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