From Publishers Weekly
Inspired by his studies of North African history and well-schooled in classical Arabic, Tayler, an Atlantic contributing editor and author of two previous travel books, set out to taste for himself the traditional lifestyle of the Bedouin nomads by trekking through southern Morocco's Drƒa Valley by mule, camel and foot. Unlike most travel accounts, this book doesn't describe famous places, and cuisine is mostly memorable in its absence (e.g., the time Tayler refused to eat sand-baked bread with the density of fecal matter). Instead, it treats readers to something infinitely rarer: a glimpse of nomadic Muslims' worldview. Some proselytize from morning to evening prayer, while others commune with their beloved camels, but for all, "no matter what happened, they praised God." Would a flash flood take their lives? Would their camels starve for lack of forage? "God writes every man's ajal" (hour of death), they'd answer, fully accepting God's will. Daily ritual in the desert pulses with faith, as Tayler's companions determine dawn prayer time by distinguishing a black from a white thread and perform ritual ablutions with scorching sand instead of water. Conversation on less religious themes reveals highly nuanced tribalism, occasional snippets of Al Jazeera- sourced world news and inexplicable rumors (e.g., is Al Gore Arab? Did ancient Portuguese cut stone villages in the Atlas Mountains?). Tayler offers a camel driver's point of view of a complex society, a view that's at once unassuming, extremely informative and even entertaining. Photos and map not seen by PW.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Tayler, author of Facing the Congo (2000) and Siberian Dawn (1999), takes readers on a 300-mile journey through the wasteland suffering from an eight-year drought, accompanied by Bedouin guides and a one-humped Arabian camel. He describes the heat, the exhaustion, and the dust storms that "blew through the valley, bending the palms and browning out the sky, filling the air with dirgelike gales." Tayler, who speaks fluent Arabic, writes eloquently of the plagues of insects, the jackals howling at night, and the mud villages. He tells how families live in poverty and filth; most of them are illiterate but they welcomed him in their homes. Tayler discusses their beliefs and traditions in an Islamic society. A fascinating and informative book. ^B George Cohen
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
"A fascinating and informative book." -Booklist

Review
"A fascinating and informative book." -Booklist

Book Description
Hailed by Bill Bryson and the New York Times Book Review as an emerging master of travel writing, Tayler penetrates one of the most forbidding regions on Earth. Journeying along routes little altered since the Middle Ages, he uses his linguistic and observational gifts to illuminate a venerable, enigmatic culture of nomads and mystics.
Though no stranger to privation (having journeyed across Siberia and up the Congo for his earlier books), Tayler is unprepared for the physical challenges that await him in a Sahara dessicated by eight years of unprecedented drought. He travels across a landscape of nightmares - charred earth, blinding sky, choking gales, and what is fittingly called the Valley of the Dead. The last Westerner to attempt this trek left his skeleton in the sand, and even Tayler's camels wilt in the searing wastes.
But his remarkable perseverance, as well as his fluency in classical and Moroccan Arabic, helps him find here a bracing purity. The Saharawi Bedouin among whom he journeys are ur-Arabs, untouched by the modernity or radicalism that festers elsewhere in the Arab world. By revealing their ingenuity, their wit, their unrivaled hospitality, and more, Tayler upends our notions of what is, and what is not, essentially Arab.

About the Author
JEFFREY TAYLER writes frequently for the Atlantic, where he is a contributing editor, as well as for National Geographic, Condé Nast Traveler, Salon.com, and other publications. His previous book was Facing the Congo.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
1
Other Lives to Lead
The Road to the Drâa Valley

In 1986, while in graduate school writing a master"s thesis on famine in the
Soviet Ukraine, I discovered two books that pointed me toward
transformational peregrinations in the Arab world. The first was Wilfred
Thesiger"s Arabian Sands, the great British explorer"s account of his
postwar travels on foot and by camel with Bedouin tribesmen in the Empty
Quarter of the Arabian Peninsula. Though hired by the Middle East Anti-
Locust Unit to search out locust breeding grounds, Thesiger pursued a
personal quest while in Arabia, a quest intimately related to the nomads with
whom he lived: he hoped to "find the peace that comes with solitude, and
among the [Bedouin], comradeship in a hostile world." The spirit of the
Bedouin, he wrote, "lit the desert like a flame." Traversing much of Oman and
Saudi Arabia in their company, he at first felt like "an uncouth and inarticulate
barbarian, an intruder from a shoddy and materialistic world." So poor were
the Bedouin that they wore only smocks, loincloths, and daggers, yet they
never stole from him. Indeed, they proved themselves paragons of desert
virtue, and, during the five years he spent roaming the sands as their guest,
they became his closest friends. Thesiger emerged from the Empty Quarter
hardened by heat, hunger, thirst, and tribal raids, and forever after felt himself
a stranger in "civilized" company. He had, in sum, found what he was looking
for among the Bedouin, and it had transformed him.
When I read Sands, I was studying Arabic, having had an inkling
that adventure — another life, even — awaited me in the Arab world. Sands
introduced me to the Bedouin, who were masters of terrain in which one
needed stamina and courage to survive. I read and reread the book,
dreaming of journeys in the Empty Quarter, but Arabia had changed much
since Thesiger"s day, as he himself had written. In the 1970s he had revisited
his old haunts and found them an "Arabian nightmare" of oil money and
skyscrapers, of Bedouin who had abandoned their camels for Land Rovers.
Sands was really an elegy, a travelogue that would, he hoped, remain
a "memorial to a vanished past, a tribute to a once magnificent people."
Soon after finishing Sands, I came across the other book that
fired me with passion for the Arab world: Philip K. Hitti"s History of the Arabs.
Every word of History rang with the author"s love of Arab civilization, the
Islamic era of which began in the seventh century with the eruption of Arab
armies, largely composed of Bedouin tribesmen, out of Arabia. In the name
of Islam, the Arabs conquered all of North Africa; in Europe, they overran
Spain and reached France; in Asia, they made it to China. "Around the name
of the Arabs," Hitti wrote, "would gleam the halo that belongs to
world-conquerors." To the Bedouin, "the Arabian nation is the noblest of all
nations (afkhar alumam). The civilized man, from the Bedouin"s exalted point
of view, is less happy and far inferior. In the purity of his blood, his eloquence
and poetry, his sword and horse and above all his noble ancestry (nasab),
the Arabian takes infinite pride. . . . The phenomenal and almost unparalleled
efflorescence of early Islam was due in no small measure to the latent
powers of the Bedouins, who, in the words of the Caliph "Umar, "furnished
Islam with its raw material.""
From Hitti I learned that the Bedouin were not only the archetypal
wanderers, but also the co-originators of Islamic civilization, which was
once one of the most progressive civilizations on earth. From the eighth to
the thirteenth centuries, while Europe recovered from barbarian invasions and
suffered seignorialism and feudal rule, Córdoba of the Umayyad dynasty
and Baghdad of the Abbasids rivaled Constantinople in splendor. While
Western Europe was largely illiterate, the Arabs were conquering the Middle
Eastern and North African territories of Byzantium and absorbing Hellenic
culture; Arab caliphs were reading Aristotle; and Arab thinkers were
syncretizing Hellenic and Islamic philosophies and transmitting Greek
scholarship to Europe, thus eventually fostering the Renaissance. During the
Middle Ages Arabic became a language of science and literature and, by way
of Medieval Latin, contributed to English a wealth of now common words,
among them "alcohol," "algebra," "syrup," and "coffee." From the eastern
realms of their empire, the Arabs brought back Hindi ("Indian," later
called "Arabic") numerals and passed them on to Europe; the Indian concept
of zero permitted the birth of modern mathematics and science. The Arabs
kept alive the ancient Greek notion that the earth was round and, through a
work in Latin, delivered it to Columbus, thus aiding his discovery of the
Americas.
Hitti"s work taught me that the Arabs were the exponents of a
civilization that differed fundamentally from that of the West. Whereas in the
West commercialism and multitudinous creeds, religions, and philosophies
flourish and in their cacophony offer no single answer to our existential
quandaries, in most of the Arab world one religion, Islam (which translates
as "submission"— to the will of God), dominates all aspects of life,
demanding of its followers discipline, self-abnegation, and the observance of
ritual. In the concept of Umma, the Islamic Nation, are a refutal of Western
individualism and an antidote to loneliness and alienation. Moreover, and
this was crucial to me as a traveler, the cities that gave birth to this
civilization bore some of the most exotic and alluring names (Baghdad,
Marrakesh, Damascus) that I had ever heard.
After reading Hitti, I threw myself into the study of Arabic,
spending six hours every day learning grammar, listening to tapes, and
meeting with my Jordanian and Palestinian instructors. A year later, in
1987, I quit graduate school, flew to Portugal, and sailed from Algeciras in
southern Spain across the Strait of Gibraltar to Morocco, from where I
intended to make my way east across the entire Arab world, my destination
Baghdad.
This was a grand idea that owed more to rash enthusiasm than to
planning. A few days after arriving in Morocco, beneath the soaring minarets
and earthen ramparts of Meknès, I ate a bad kebab and it nearly killed me
with a fortnight of nausea, vomiting, dizzying headaches, and diarrhea. But
along with food poisoning I confronted other impediments. Darija, the Arabic
dialect of Morocco, proved almost completely unintelligible to me, bearing
little resemblance to the classical Arabic I had been studying. I thus found
myself able to recite chapters from A Thousand and One Nights while
having trouble understanding directions to the bathrooms I so often needed.
There were also faux guides who set upon Nasranis ("foreigners," or more
exactly, "Nazarenes," "Christians") in the streets. Day after day, as I
staggered out of my hotel to buy yogurt and Lomotil, I was accosted by
unemployed youths demanding I hire them as guides for tours of the
medina. Few took kindly to rejection. One youth whose services I declined
grew irate. "You won"t hire me! Then you"ll rot in a Moroccan prison!" He
turned to passersby and shouted, while pointing at me, "Drug dealer! Drug
dealer! This Nasrani"s trying to sell me drugs! Police! Police! Drug dealer!"
There were no police about, though, and I slipped back into my hotel, shaken
up and uncomprehending. More incidents like this followed.
Previous travels in Europe and Turkey had not prepared me for
Morocco. Still sick, I gave up and staggered aboard a plane in Casablanca,
bound first for Rome and then for familiar haunts in the eastern
Mediterranean. My plans for the Arab world would have to wait. I would have
to prepare myself better if ever again I attempted to tread in Thesiger"s
footsteps.
After seven months of rambling around Italy, Greece, and Turkey,
I ran out of money and returned to the States. I pursued my study of Arabic
at a language institute in Washington, D.C., and wondered what to do next.
Having no other ideas but wanting to return to an Arab country (any Arab
country but Morocco, that is), I applied to join the Peace Corps and was
called in for an interview. The Peace Corps occupied an old building in the
center of town. Fans chopped the air above desks cluttered with amulets
and native trinkets from West Africa and Central America; posters of smiling
African children and Bolivian peasants in colorful shawls hung on yellowed
walls. There was an earnestness about the besandaled employees there
that I found disagreeable.
The recruitment officer to whom I spoke was a perky young
woman in a frumpy dress. Scribbling and hunched over a mess of papers,
she asked me to explain why I wanted to be a volunteer. I sensed that I
needed an altruistic motive along the lines of Thesiger"s locust research to
win her over, so I said something about wanting to help people in developing
countries better their lives. This platitude elicited smiles and comments
about how my undergraduate degree in psychology (a discipline I had
renounced) would suit the Peace Corps just fine. She scribbled away.
"Sooo . . . is there any place you"d prefer to go?" "Since I speak
Arabic, I"d like to go to Yemen or Tunisia." I paused. "The only place I don"t
want to go is Morocco."
"Peace Corps is not a travel agency," she said, in a tone that
sounded like it portended my imminent disqualification. "You can"t choose
your country of service."
"Then why did you ask me where I wanted to go?"
"You can state your preference, that"s all. You should be ready to
serve in whatever country we offer you for the good of the people . . ."
A few weeks later she called me. "We have an opening."
"Where?"
"In Morocco."
"But . . . you have nothing else?"
She told me that Morocco was all they had available in an Arab
country at the time, and reminded me that if I turned her down I might lead
her to believe that I saw Peace Corps as a travel agency. I thought it over
for a few minutes. My money had run out, and I had no other prospects for
employment. I accepted her offer and was soon on a plane for Morocco.
After three months of instruction in Moroccan Arabic and culture
in Rabat, I was given a two-year assignment in Marrakesh, working with a
school for the blind and with the parents of handicapped children. Dating
from the eleventh century, Marrakesh is an imperial city of souks and snake
charmers and hash-scented alleys largely enclosed in earthen walls on a
burnt-out plain, beneath the snow-mantled peaks of the High Atlas. I took
up residence in the casbah (from the Arabic qasaba, or citadel) district, far
from other volunteers; I adopted an Arabic name, Jelal, because I found that
few Moroccans could remember my own. There were no Bedouin in the
casbah or elsewhere in Marrakesh, but there were many faux guides. Now
that I was a long-term guest in their country, I was compelled to reach a sort
of modus vivendi with them. I could not escape them, and they were, after all,
just poor youths in a country where there was little work. But I never allowed
them to intimidate me as they had the previous year. When necessary, I
adopted their blustering tactics and threatening postures and used them
against them. The only time I have ever hit anybody was while I was a Peace
Corps volunteer in Marrakesh.
In any case, I discovered a distraction that brought me closer to
Moroccan life than any job with the Peace Corps ever would: Moroccan
women. The first year I didn"t dare engage them; the second year I found I
couldn"t resist. They glided down Marrakesh"s alleys of dung-leavened dust,
their kohl-daubed eyes alert, their breasts swinging under the silk of flowing
djellabas, their hair glinting with the warm tints of henna. The prospect of
marrying a rich (to them) American made me attractive enough, as did the
chance to dabble in pleasures of the flesh with a forbidden Christian; they
knew that Nasranis would not despise them as whores for sleeping with
them.
This was new territory for me. During training, Peace Corps
instructors had warned female volunteers of the trauma they could expect to
suffer in adjusting to the second-class status Islamic society would impose
on them, but they said nothing to male volunteers about the magic
Moroccan women practiced to trap a mate (though they did warn us that irate
brothers and knife-wielding fathers made "dating" an exceedingly dangerous
business). The instructors said not a word about the evening paseo, during
which single men and women strolled the downtown avenues, arranging
trysts after exchanging little more than stares and smiles. They certainly
didn"t mention sbagha (painting), the practice whereby a Moroccan woman,
desirous of maintaining her virginity yet determined to get off with her lover,
vigorously "paints" her clitoris with the tip of his erect penis. Nor did they tell
us anything about the prevalence of prostitutes, often veiled, who worked
the crowds of big cities at dusk, searching for clients as the call to prayer
sounded. The word qahba (whore) was not even in the Peace Corps manual
of Moroccan Arabic, though it was one of the more frequently used words in
the language.
So I did my time in Marrakesh, conducting trysts, evading
brothers, reading Arabic literature, and yearning for even more adventure,
more escape, something along the lines of what Thesiger had described in
Arabian Sands. Then, at the very end of my tour, Iraq invaded Kuwait. Just
as I was preparing to travel to the Middle East to try to start a career in
photojournalism, another volunteer told me of a valley in Morocco"s remote
south called the Drâa. The Drâa was, he said, the desert wasteland from
which, in the sixteenth century, warriors of the Saadi dynasty had emerged
to halt the advances of the Portuguese and the Ottoman Turks. In a shivery
flash of insight I saw that the Drâa was what I had been searching for all
along: there, gazelles fleeted and oases of palms shimmered like seas of
emerald; there, Morocco ended and the no man"s land of the Sahara, vast
and ready for exploration, began; and, most important, there dwelled
Bedouin, unspoiled Bedouin who knew nothing of the pampered lifestyle of
their oil-rich brethren in the east. Whereas much of the Arab world had been
modernized, even radicalized, beyond recognition since the end of the
colonial era, the Drâa, from what I could tell, had remained a sort of ur-Arab
paradise.
As I packed to leave Morocco I read up on the Drâa. The valley
begins 150 miles southeast of Marrakesh, on the Saharan side of the
moonscape crags of the Atlas, where the red clay wadis (seasonal
riverbeds) of Ouarzazate and Dadès converge. Watered by underground
springs and the April melt of Atlas snows, the Drâa River cuts its way for 160
miles southeast across the 6,500-foot-high Saghro massif (an offshoot of the
High Atlas) and enters the Sahara proper through Beni Slimane pass in Jbel
(mount) Bani to reach the oasis village of Mhamid. From Mhamid the Drâa
veers west and snakes for 375 more miles through the desert, along the base
of the Anti-Atlas, to debouch into the Atlantic. The six palm oases of the
Drâa"s upper reaches (from Ouarzazate to Mhamid) rest on fertile loam and
support ancient agricultural communities dwelling in elaborate, towered
casbahs and walled villages known in Darija as qsars (from the classical
Arabic qasr, or palace), made of ochre-hued adobe bricks hewn from the
river"s banks. The French dubbed this part of the valley the coude du Drâa, a
metaphor hinting at the origin of the Drâa"s name: a corruption of the Arabic
word dhira" (arm). About the lower expanses of the valley beginning at
Mhamid and extending to the Atlantic I could find no information.
From the ninth through the fifteenth century, the Drâa served as
one of the main caravan routes between Europe and Timbuktu. The desert-
wise Bedouin, or Ruhhal (from the Arabic rahala, "to wander from place to
place") in the Arabic dialects of North Africa, were the master navigators of
this eleven-hundred-mile channel across the sea of sand. After making the
two-month crossing of the desert, lengthy, plodding caravans arrived in the
Drâa bearing ivory, gold, and slaves. The last of these were among the most
profitable of the caravans" commodities: the Africans whom Ruhhal traders
bought from dealers in Timbuktu for fifteen to twenty talers could fetch ten
times more in Marrakesh. In exchange for slaves and gold, the Ruhhal took
to West Africa leather goods and textiles, and, eventually, guns; they also
spread Islam in the Sahel, which is Muslim to this day. The last slave
caravan, it is said, crossed the Sahara in the 1950s.
The valley was, historically, a wilderness not only of sand and
rock but also of raiders and rebels. The Drâa belonged to the bilad al-siba
(the land of dissidence), the domain of anarchy and tribal rule where the writ
of Moroccan sultans held little sway, and where local chieftains known as
qa"ids and sheikhs reigned in qsars and casbahs, suffering frequent attacks
from Ruhhal tribes. The Ruhhal of the Drâa, especially the "Arib tribe,
earned themselves a formidable reputation as warriors. The "Arib subdued the
indigenous Sanhaja Berbers, whom they terrorized into payment of tribute.
They eventually crossed the Atlas Mountains and penetrated the Sous
Valley, and for a while even raised revolt against the sultans of Marrakesh.
Bilad al-siba, I repeated to myself. The Land of Dissidence.
Intrigued by this history of battling tribes and desert warriors, I left Morocco
for the Middle East, vowing to one day travel the Drâa.

In 1996 I visited the Drâa — and made a serendipitous error that nearly cost
me my life. Accompanied by a teenage Ruhhal guide, I drove my Peugeot
eleven miles off the cracked tarmac of the Drâa"s only road onto a piste, or
desert track, to camp for the night on the dunes, near a tent owned by a
Ruhhal named Ali Daimin. At midnight a wind (called a Shirgi, I was to
learn — among the Ruhhal every wind has a name) howled in from the torrid
wastes of Algeria to the east. By sunrise the Shirgi was flaying the entire
valley, blowing sand at ninety miles an hour and raising temperatures to
120 degrees; it covered the piste and disoriented my guide on our drive back
to the tarmac. Having no water, food, maps, or radio with us, and suffering a
punctured radiator as we bumped over stony tableland in search of the road,
we could have remained lost and died of thirst. But five hours later we ended
up back where we started, and came upon — indeed, nearly ran right over
— Ali"s tent. Ali took us in. When the wind subsided, he guided us back to
the tarmac. I offered him money as compensation but he refused it.
Ali impressed me. Not only did he know the desert, but he
radiated modesty and had an inherent dignity that I would later come to
associate with the "Arib. He was in his mid-thirties. He was high of brow
and aquiline of nose; his features hinted at Yemeni ancestry. (The "Arib
claimed to be descended from Yemeni Bedouin who arrived in the Drâa in the
twelfth century.) Like most "Arib, he wore a black turban called a firwal and a
white smock known as a fouqiya. He tended flocks of camels and goats and
preferred the peace of life on the sands to the tumult of the cities, but unlike
most of his tribesmen, he was educated: he had studied history and
geography at a university in Marrakesh. His intellect and pride in his Ruhhal
heritage marked him as someone with whom I wanted to keep in touch, and
I left the Drâa understanding I had made a friend who would one day play an
important role in my life.
Two years later Ali arranged and accompanied me on my first real
expedition in the Drâa — a two-week trip by camel and on foot in the coude
region, ending just to the east of Mhamid at the dunes of Shgaga. This
outing gave me a glimpse of the valley"s unsettling beauty, but most of all it
whetted my appetite for more. Under the red sky of dusk, standing atop a
dune at Shgaga, I conceived a desire to push on to the Atlantic — a distance
of some 350 miles. I asked Ali to research the possibility of my making a
descent of the entire valley at another time. He agreed, but did so
cautiously. From Shgaga to the Atlantic was Ruhhal land, yes, but wells in
that distant stretch of valley were said to be days of walking apart, the routes
between them known to only a few. Without the protection of the Saghro
range, the heat and Shirgi-driven sandstorms would be terrible in that part of
the Drâa (which bordered the open Sahara), and both Westerners and
Moroccans had lost their way and died of thirst there. Literature on the lower
part of the valley was scant: French colonial officers stuck to the coude and
had little reason to travel into the wastes beyond it.
There were other reasons for caution. After 1912, when the French
established their protectorate over most of northern and central Morocco,
the country"s far south remained undemarcated bilad al-siba where
thousands of spirited Ruhhal rebels fought the colonialists in vicious desert
wars. Only in 1934 did the French manage to subdue the Drâa. It was not
until 1956 that the French, in an attempt to prevent Algerian independence
fighters from basing themselves in Morocco, built a series of fortresses from
Figuig in eastern Morocco along the Drâa to Tarfaya, on the Atlantic, thereby
making the valley Morocco"s de facto if not de jure southern border.
Morocco and Algeria never recognized this makeshift border. A
dispute soon developed between them (and Mauritania) over the hundred
thousand square miles of phosphate-rich desert to the south of the frontier.
This land, now known as the Western Sahara, had belonged to Morocco
from the 1500s until the Spanish seized it during the colonial era. When
Spanish dictator Francisco Franco died in 1975, King Hassan II of Morocco
launched a march of 350,000 civilians across the border to "reclaim" the
Western Sahara, and his army occupied the region. The Ruhhal of the
Western Sahara, aided by Algeria and Libya, formed the Polisario (the
National Front for the Liberation of the People of the Western Sahara) and
took up arms against the Moroccans. A long guerilla war ensued. Although
the polisario and Hassan II concluded a truce in 1991, stipulating that
Morocco allow the conduct of a referendum on the Western Sahara"s future,
no vote had been held, and periodically the frustrated guerillas threatened to
take up arms again. The Drâa border region, thus, remained a potential locus
of conflict, and in places it had been mined. One part of the valley, in fact,
was said to be a forbidden military zone where the Moroccan army hunted
guerillas and smugglers and allowed no one, whether Moroccan or foreign, to
enter.
Despite these risks, the Drâa exercised a pull on me, and I was
as determined as ever to travel it. Whereas most of Thesiger"s Bedouin had
settled decades ago, Drâa Ruhhal still roamed the sands, and questions
arose in my mind. Was there any valor left in their way of life, or had it
become an anachronism? The Drâa Ruhhal regarded herding animals as
their cherished occupation and considered agriculture and trades the work
of "inferior" villagers and townsmen. Now that animal products were mass-
produced on farms, were the Ruhhal degenerating into parasites of the
people they disdained? A drought had afflicted southern Morocco since 1997.
How was it affecting the Ruhhal, who depended on fragile desert vegetation to
pasture their herds? Could lack of rain move the Ruhhal off the sands as oil
money had prompted Thesiger"s Bedouin to settle?
During the autumn of 2000 Ali sent word to me in Moscow (where
I live) that my expedition would be possible, if not without risk, in the
following winter and spring (when the weather would be relatively cool).
Suddenly, all my time in Morocco and trips to the Drâa seemed like a
prelude to the chance to realize a dream I had nurtured for fifteen years, ever
since reading Arabian Sands and History of the Arabs.

Copyright © 2003 by Jeffrey Tayler. Reprinted by permission of Houghton
Mifflin Company.