Eureka, Ourika

I promised that I would only blog if I finished the Quartet section.

But I have the willpower of an unsupervised child in a sweet shop.

Each time I visit another country for more than a few days I rue that I neglect to post more in situ: this is a remedy.

After days in the smog-filled, sunlight-dappled derbs and souks of Marrakesh, today brought unpolluted air, dazzling azure skies and crispy white mountains that first serrated the horizon, then bore down as geo-giants.

My first glimpse of the Atlas Mountains – long sought, much fabled – was as breath-taking as any mountainous vista.

The added beauty came in the form of the seemingly urbane: a herd of camels munching sprigs from the dusty ground; women bowed with age climbing steep ravines with boulder-bags of rice; a child, framed by a flaming sunset, unsuccessfully clambering on a petulant donkey.

A side note: globalization.

Even in the remotest, most scraggy and depleted area of the ravines – where only string bridges held together by flimsy twigs and gap-toothed septuagenarians switched their goats on vertiginous slopes – the emblem of Coca-Cola was ubiquitous.

Whether daubed on home-sides or bill-boarded with Nancy Ajram grinning coquettishly, the juxtaposed ancient tradition with rampant consumerism was both amusing and wearisome.

As the womenfolks of the Berber household we visited ground flour and churned butter by hand, a pair of pink Converse sneaker-booties for a toddler hung over the edge of the balcony.

On pillars of the village café the Pepsi sphere was ameliorated by Berber paintbrushship.

Nevertheless, the peculiarity of the pervasiveness of entities such as Pepsi, Coca-Cola and Converse fared as but a blur in comparison to the wider milieu.

Ourika was stunning, the Atlas even more so.