Читать книгу The High Atlas. Treks and climbs on Morocco's biggest and best mountains онлайн

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I’d been up before, but still took a while to hit a path that led round a 3059m point towards the Tizi n’ Taghighacht (2662m), a major north–south pass. At one stage we heard the bleating of new-born lambs and found them in a small protective pit roofed over with stones. In just a few days, however, they’d be coping with their inhospitable landscape. There were many cairns on the tizi and well-made zigzags down before we headed off for the red world leading to the blue lake (2270m).

From there we watched the tones of evening on Fazaz, which stood up as a blunt prow through the gap of our morning pass. We would see it again on other visits, and also many times from the twin lake of Tislit, further west, so it hangs as a very special icon in our visual memories.

The two lakes are fiancé and fiancée, derivations lying in a folktale of thwarted love, the lakes being the tears of denied happiness caused by family feuding – the Berber version of Romeo and Juliet. Apart from lapping water and the occasional sounds of a shepherd’s distant pipe there was only the tingling silence of the desert. Such stars too; and the Milky Way like a dust trail across from black horizon crest to black horizon crest.