Stepping onto the airport tarmac, I felt a stirring of elation. I hadn’t been in Morocco since a milquetoast undergraduate outing in Marrakesh with a girlfriend a decade earlier. While the Maghrebin Disneyland I had found there had thoroughly put me off North Africa, a week’s study trip in Tunisia in 2014 had restored my faith somewhat since; hence I had resolved to approach Morocco anew with an open mind.

My journey here for a week was designed as a counterweight to my study of Phoenician and Tartessian Spain. I wanted to understand as to what similarities and differences the Moroccan Phoenician sites might evidence. Morocco had been colonised later than southern Spain, and tracing this would prove exciting. I also needed to practice some Arabic in an environment where I could fall back upon French; the Middle East later in my journey might not be so forgiving of my linguistic cockups.

My departure from Madrid was rather precipitate, and I would rather have lingered there; I had booked the flights before embarking on my journey in some overzealous nocturnal budget airlines binge, and now I was to go through with it. I had arrived in Tangiers, itself Phoenician once, but I would only stay the afternoon and evening, taking a night train south to the farthest known Phoenician outpost, Mogador, modern Essaouira, and then work my way back up the coast over the week, flying back to Madrid from Tangiers at the end of a week.

After an overpriced taxi, there being no public transport to or from the airport, I was at Tangiers train station. While very modern, I discovered that it lacked any kind of consigne where I could store my baggage for the eight hours while I walked about town. I asked a guard and he shrugged, telling me that Moroccans arrive at the station punctually. Urgh. I would have to schlepp my kit around the whole day until the train. Nonetheless, I strode out into the town with the strange joy that comes from being in an Arab country again, thinking how wonderful Tangiers looked in the midday sun.

The little man started following me. He didn’t stop. He followed me doggedly for nigh fifteen minutes down the promenade until I relented and admitted that I was walking to the Kasbah. With my backpack I was very easy game for this kind of hustle, and he had known that I would soon reach the fringes of the bustling medina and be beyond the help of any Google Maps. Knowing I couldn’t be rid of him, my mind switched to hustle-reduction mode. I did need to get there to see the Museum of the Kasbah, and I could probably squeeze this out of him for minimal backsheesh. Moreover, much like an occupied taxi, nobody else would be able to scam me while he was scamming me. I could play this correctly and turn the tables on him. I assumed an outwardly ovine tourist demeanour and let him lead me about the medina. I made a point of changing my mind various times as to my final destination. He lead me through a sort of decrepit semi-souk, where I nearly stepped on dead cats a couple of times, but every time he got me to a selling point, I promptly changed my mind. Unfortunately, I overplayed my hand and he retaliated by leading me into a carpet seller’s shop. I explained that I had no way of carrying a carpet but still he persisted. The wizened, German speaking carpet seller tried all sorts of tricks, but soon realised that I wasn’t going to budge and I knew the entire game. What surprised me was that he didn’t react with feigned hurt as the bazaar shopkeeper usually does, the final ploy to guilt a tourist into a purchase, but was rather genuinely angry, stating simply “Sie können jetzt gehen” and shuffling off to complain to my guide. The little man had evidently lost some face by wasting the old man’s time with me, and he outright demanded payment as we left the shop. I blustered but noticed more and more people staring at me, and realised that bedecked with all of this baggage I couldn’t stride off nonchalant, my usual trick in these situations. I would have to take the blow, gave him half of his demanded price but still far more than he deserved. Urgh.

I found relief in the Museum of the Kasbah, which had some charming material, especially a very fetching mosaic of Venus taking a cruise surrounded by nymphs and the like, and some very interesting mortuary material. The Mesopotamians mostly buried their dead under the floors of their own houses, so a necropolis is quite an exciting prospect for someone hailing from my neck of the woods. Exhilaration aside, I was knackered. Sloping out of the museum exhausted, desperate to return to the safety of the Starbucks at the train station where I could camp out by a power socket and answer emails with the tenuous wifi, I was waylaid by another

“I will help you get there. Perhaps you are interested in history, yes?” Urgh. He was guiding me without my consent, and, overburdened as I was, he could shuffle after me and keep pace. I was back in the jug. He started his spiel about the Kasbah and the various Western artistic delinquents who had made it their home. Ibn Battuta’s alleged grave was bypassed for the domiciles of Burroughs, Kerouac, then Keith Richards and so on, and the immense ennui of this Beat-cum-Hippie graveyard I was being led through hung heavier on me than my baggage. I actually felt bad when he produced a photograph of possibly himself with arguably the singer from The Doors and I could only muster a hollow “gosh”.

Having worked as a tour guide on and off with considerable success for years, I pride myself on knowing how any touristic grift works. I wondered at his commanding technique in the midst of this dreary visit to the habitations of various members of the “27 Club”. He had this glorious trick of endlessly poking me with his index finger to assert himself. I would have never tried this with Americans back in Heidelberg.

It was a ceaseless stream of celebrity houses and I was now utterly an unwilling captive. When he commented that I was not taking any pictures of the Kasbah, I was a good chap and began mechanically snapping shots of architecture I was well beyond caring about. Again, I could only fight a rear-guard action against all this hustle. I tried various schemes out in my head, but I would have to give him a pourbouire. I went for a final gambit, having shown him my DAI papers.

“I’m very poor from all this travelling, but touched by your tour, Abdullah. Give me your address and I’ll send you a postcard in thanks!” He nodded.

“I like postcards, but perhaps you will give me money. Euros are fine. Good for cigarettes.”

There was no budging. Sighing, I discharged another needless note and finally made it to the taxi ranks where the trials continued. Fire and pan metaphors abounded in my head. I have been driven by many taxis in the Middle East, but this chap effortlessly won his place at the top of my dangerous driving leader board, neatly dislodging the Ankara taxi driver who had cut across three lanes while lighting me a cigarette and the lift down a chicaning mountain road I once received from a heavily stoned Turkish motorcyclist.

As he gleefully screeched to a halt for the umpteenth time, almost sending me into the windscreen (the seatbelt naturally inextant), I asked myself if he was doing it on purpose. A few times I had seen him cruise into pretty girls’ paths and snigger as they ran for the safety of the trottoir. In fact, all of his pedestrian near-misses had been women. Perhaps some deeper psychological pattern was manifesting itself in this man’s driving. Certainly, the remainder of my taxi rides in Morocco were comparatively stately affairs in which I had no complaints. I almost kissed the Starbucks coffee table once I got into the station.

On the train, the moment that the conductor ushered me into my cabin, the annoyances of the past day in Tangiers evaporated. I had a cabin, my own dinky little bed, and even a wash kit and slippers. It was everything my five-year-old self had ever wanted from adulthood, to take a night train to Marrakesh in a sleeper car. That there was no electricity and the toilet didn’t flush were mere trifles. I took a gleeful tot from my flask and drifted off to sleep. I awoke at about five o’clock to a glorious rosy sun creeping over low arid hills, wondered at the beauty of this country to the glorious sway and click-clack of the train.

After a complimentary breakfast in Marrakesh, I took a bus to Essaouira, sitting next to Will, an ocean surveyor on holiday. Like archaeology, ocean surveying involves people being cooped up together until madness in pursuit of a relatively abstract goal, and we had many stories to swap. Most staggering, though, were his stories of maritime construction. Ships like cities, giant cranes built upon two oil tankers lashed together, fortunes expended and sometimes lost merely on weather’s whim, it was all a far cry from Phoenicians, although the principles were ultimately the same. I also learnt that dolphins love to rub themselves against the ship’s sensors, and that there are patches of the sea floor which always return strange anomalies, “probably military”.

Essaouira was certainly very beautiful, albeit its walled centre rather titchy. Weaving my way between men dragging carts of fish, I was filled with the sheer joy of the sights and scents, the salt of the sea, the call of gulls, and I bought freshly baked bread just for its wonderful smell. Freshly baked bread has a strange power over me, a relic of early mornings on fieldwork.

After hitting my riad (a sort of bed and breakfast in a traditional Moroccan house), I pottered off to the bay to stare out at the Isle of Mogador, the reason for my visit, the furthest-flung Phoenician outpost of which we know. The island, actually a peninsula in their day, was now a bird sanctuary. Indeed, it had been host to the strangest of fowl, as Dirce Marzoli had mentioned to me in Madrid: During the excavations, the remains of a penguin had astoundingly been found adjacent to Phoenician betyl (or sacred stone). The mind staggers at the distances the bird must have travelled. Had it been scooped up by some Phoenican naturalist? Had these seafarers gone further than even the Periplus described? I guess that the sorry bird could also have been passed from one indigenous group to another, like some species of Iron Age Pokémon, until it finally fell into roving Tyrian hands. It is worth introducing my own penguin at this point, a small plastic figurine solemnly presented to me by my goddaughter Maria before I left for the journey, who I have dubbed Hanno after the famed Phoenician navigator. I’ve kept him in my jacket pocket throughout my journey for luck, where he endlessly jostles with my rosary. As I write now, I cannot help but inspect my pockets and find endless peculiar gubbins therein, the ticket stubs from museums, endless pens, memory sticks, forms of identification, scraps of paper from hurried notetaking. What an archaeological find I’d make!

At some point while trotting about the backstreets, I bumped into Saïd, a somewhat saturnine carpet seller, and we ended up discussing history for half an hour or so. The conversation turned to Mogador, and even a fleeting memory of Frau Marzoli: “ah, oui, les fouilles … il y aurait une femme allemande, je me souviens…” a languorous flourish of a hand. Evening brought a prompt shift in weather. A strong wind blew from the sea, vast numbers of shrill starlings rearranged themselves on a single creaking tree, and a moisture filled the air. I sat drinking an overpriced beer for which I had misread the price, having discovered that the local museum was closed and thus calling it a day. I thought to myself “Now, Edmonds, get cracking on that novel!” and I industriously fished out my notebook, lit a cigarette to help me think. Yet the novel wouldn’t come. Such a beautiful place with its strange echoes, wheeling birds, and no inspiration forthcoming. Irritated, I slumped back to my riad and pushed myself further to write, quite without success. Frustration mounting, I reached for my flask, determined to finish the damn paragraph.

Morning brought an empty flask and scarce 500 words written. I had, at least, met Will by chance at some juncture in the night. Tut. Regretting playing at Malcolm Lowry, I dragged myself to the Musée Sidi Ben Abdullah. While Mogador filled only a couple of cabinets, the building itself was quite beautiful, and I was fascinated by the displays on various secret sects of itinerant spiritual musicians such as the Gnaouis. These blokes and lasses would work themselves into spiritual highs though mere song. Perhaps I should have attempted the like the night before. In penance, I sloped off to buy my mother a lavish blue tablecloth-cum-blanket from Saïd, who seemed in even lower spirits than the day before. We barely bothered to haggle. A swim, gazing out on that Phoenician island in the last shimmer of sunset finally put me right, and I at least managed to work on my book translation. Still, the spell was broken. Essaouira was cloying now, her beauty somewhat tarnished, the wind rasping, the sand grating. It was time to move on.

Desperate to avoid Marrakesh, I had devised a coastal bus route, planning to get a feeling for the shores the Phoenicians had once landed upon. The reality would differ somewhat upon boarding the bus at seven the following morning. The coastal road was about half a mile inland with a low hill-range between the bus and the sea. The only succour was chit-chatting with Claudia in the seat behind me who was travelling about with a friend. We discussed my interminable novel, various plot-holes and inconsistencies soon coming to light. Morocco had not been kind to the poor story.

Quite devoid of tourists, Rabat’s bustling medina was a feast of colour, if hardly navigable, and I stomped about the souk for three quarters of an hour in search of my riad. At once there was a tug on my backpack. Wheeling to face my pickpocket, I was instead proffered my camera’s lens-cap. Rabat was not Marrakesh. Walking about its winding streets, now night, I drank in the sounds of the day’s end, the bustle of prayers ended, the rush for street food. I have a great weakness for such tuck, despite the lack of handwashing and fragrant cross-contamination which the preparation thereof entails. I attribute lack of practically any stomach upset or bout of the runs for almost a decade (save a veritable blow-out in ’11 near Mersin, and a hellish few days in a hotel on São Tomé in ’18 after sampling a Ghanaian fish pie) to my measured consumption of such street food, much like Rasputin and arsenic: a quick mashallah and down it went.

On the way back to the riad, I noted a little barber’s shop and went in just to do something with the evening beyond salmonella roulette. As the little man went to work on my visage, first sanitising the razor with an impromptu hairspray flamethrower just behind my head, I remembered how much I actually enjoy going to the barber. The decline of the barber within the Anglosphere and the rise of the hipster-barber, an epiphenomenon of civilisational collapse if ever an example was needed, is something I should like to counter in some way. Men need this ritual. Barbering must be saved, but how? I carried this thought with me to bed, found no answer.

The next day began with a sally forth to Chellah, a key site on my Phoenician itinerary. Here my magic documents failed me for the first time, failing to convince “Monsieur le Conservateur” who demanded, in turn, papers from the Ministry of Culture. I was rumbled. The temptation was there to make a stink, like the hot-blooded Edmonds of yesteryear, but diplomacy got the better of me. Ticket paid, I swiftly learnt that was nothing much Phoenician to be seen, only Roman and Muslim ruins being tended to by gardeners. Dejected, I contented myself with photographing storks nesting in a decrepit minaret.

The National Museum at Rabat was a world apart. While quite small, it contained some wonderfully well-arranged material, including a large exhibit on the Mauritanian state, something about which I knew next to nothing. Still, I had spent four years of my life wrestling with empires, and the woes of Juba and Ptolemy as client rulers of Rome were no different from those of the Assyrians’ subaltern kinglets on their empire’s fringes. I would never want to be a client king; it sounds like an awful job.

The various extremely expressive bronzes from Volubilis in the museum bowled me over, particularly one of poor Cato. I decided that I must try to get there to see the place they had come from. I also awed for a while at the Libyan inscriptions held by the museum. How on earth did these ancient stone missals from the desert fit into the history of writing? Too much to mull over.

I managed a quick but utterly glorious swim at a beach by the kasbah before rushing to the next bus for Larache. Breathless yet contemplative, I reflected on the other foreigners I had seen so far: These belonged to two main camps, namely the Gallics, stumpy, good-humoured guignols trampling about souks in amicable packs, and their far more sinister counterparts, the Nordics. These consist almost exclusively of aging Germanic women desperately seeking spirituality in pretty much anything offering even passing “mindfulness”. If Ingmar Bergman were around today then he would be making bleak films about middle-aged Swedish women hunting for their chakras.

The Moroccans, by contrast, do come across as genuinely pious. For example, I was much taken by a Rabat businessman in a well-cut suit I saw unpretentiously ambling in his break to the local mosque for Friday prayers, rug underneath his arm, shaking hands with those at its entrance. I was also subjected to endless conversations on tawhid throughout my week in Morocco from practically anyone I met with a surprising urgency. While the complete unity of God is certainly a breath-taking intellectual proposition, its sheer austerity left me with little more to respond with than a flat “na’am” considering my own penchant for deities triune.

Speaking of austerity, it became clear to me as I walked a good forty-five minutes to the centre of Larache from the coach station that I was becoming perhaps a little too obsessive in my cost-cutting. Nonetheless, I found there a gloriously low-priced pension run by a small bearded man who claimed in broken English to have been a minor jazz musician in Europe in the seventies and immediately consented to the arrangement. That long walk from the bus station had raised a thirst; presumably this seaside resort would easily render me something of the sort. Upon asking about bars, the proprietor looked at me confusedly:

“There is a place, bad, only place, you could go buy beer leave but not stay unless you know karate, you know?”

He actually made a chopping motion with his hands. A younger me would have chortled and gamely accepted, but I have become moderate in my habits, and it seemed unreasonable to besmirch the reputation of the DAI with such antics, and so I spent the night buried in my translation instead.

That I managed 1,500 words was remarkable considering the pension’s peculiar acoustics. Salient was the flipflopping sound of an individual visiting the toilets by my room ending with a percussive concert of bodily functions. I had never heard such enduring and concurrent emphysema and diarrhoea before. Whatever the humours were, they desperately wanted to leave the man. Then it all mysteriously ceased as abruptly as it had started, as if lids had closed on whatever it was. Finally, the flapping of soles back to a room, and then nothing at all. My mind’s eye tried to imagine the strange inhabitants of this dosshouse. Upon first entering, I would have liked to have envisioned some species of Maghrebin Tom Waits shuffling out of one of the doors, gruffly intoning “marhaba, habibi”, or perhaps some gaunt, battered post-colonial Jeanne Moreau leaning against a doorframe fumbling to light a cigarette, but now I suspected that it was really only aged men with irritated throats and bowels.

The next morning, I reluctantly left my bags at the pension and headed to the ancient city of Lixus by taxi, first being brought unceremoniously to the Hotel Lixus until I made some headway in a mixture of Arabic and Spanish. Larache was formerly a Spanish holding, and has proven as impervious to French as I have to Spanish.

Lixus was a relatively early Phoenician foundation, and had enjoyed wealth and status well into the Islamic era. Its location was superb, on a huge rock outcrop controlling the entire bay. Its real money-maker, however, was garum, the pungent Mediterranean fish sauce much beloved in Antiquity, for the Romans what ketchup is for Americans. I walked through a vast complex with scores of vats for this condiment and made my way uphill to the amphitheatre. A little touch which rather charmed me was that the affluent denizens of the day had paid to have their seats permanently reserved through the engraving of their initials. I sat on one appropriately carved “A” and gazed out at the spectacular view. Who had been its former incumbent? An Ammi-Melqart, an Aemelianus, or even an Alexandros? Regardless, it was a good seat. The acropolis itself was naturally not all that large, and so the bathhouse had been wedged behind the arena, so that they shared practically the same wall. It must be a strange thing unwinding in the steam room while listening to two men fighting to the death.

I carried on, poking my head about a basilica and a couple of villae before visiting the Mauritanian palace. Not only the architecture itself, as evidenced by the ruined colonnades of the palatial complex, was marvellous, but also the planning, as I swiftly realised. The vast garum facilities at the base of the acropolis were invisible from here, and, moreover, downwind. No fishy stink would have ever reached lofty regal nostrils. Archaeologists too often forget the importance of smell to what they examine. The “post-olfactory” age we inhabit in the West, a somewhat flat sensory palate generally ranging from “Ikea meatballs” to “Ikea furniture” in scent, really has made us forget the great significance that stink must have played in the ancients’ lives.

As I descended the citadel, a guard awaited me in the museum building. To my surprise, he began asking me about how my stipend trip was going. It soon transpired that he collected DAI travelling scholars’ visiting cards, and he wanted mine for his collection. Naturally, I obliged. He then regaled me with the visits of my predecessors, salient being Polly Lohmann who had evidently made a considerable impression. By his reckoning, I was the sixth to have visited. All in all, I was very much taken by Lixus.

I walked the four or so kilometres back to Larache, munching contentedly on an apple, then went for a haircut, a gamble considering my Arabic. Much like Persian or Russian, I have never managed to keep the vocabulary actively in my head although I can generally get the gist of a conversation; an uneasy “mithil hadhu … wa lakin shweya, eh… zuz millimetre” miraculously sufficed. Still with nothing to do, I walked the four-odd kilometres to the bus station with my pack just for the exercise, giving myself sunburn in the process. Then it was on to Meknès and Volubilis. After the first day’s debacle, I had resolved to avoid Tangiers entirely, planning to head to the airport from Meknès by means of an early morning train. In the glorious medina of Meknès, I turned in after another mystery sandwich, this time proffered by an aging Moroccan resembling Hemmingway.

The next morning was a race to Notre Dame des Oliviers for mass, its congregation a melange of aging pieds noirs and youthful west coast Africans. The hymns were sung by an African choir to drum accompaniment, and the feeling was of that strange deep African spirituality with its alternations of pathos and joy, somewhat disturbed by a Korean man avidly taking pictures of everything, even the transubstantiation.

Electing once more for a shoestring solution, I took a hectic public bus to Moulay Idriss, the town closest to Volubilis and an important Muslim pilgrimage site, squashed in with innumerable old ladies. Exiting and swiftly misdirecting a self-proclaimed local “tour guide”, I walked the four-odd kilometres to the site along a mountainside smoking my pipe, encountering a mysterious spandexed American jogger along the way.

Volubilis was huge. While garum had been Lixus’ main export, Volubilis had specialised in olives, and the plains stretched out around it looked like brilliant country for such an enterprise. Here, one could find all of the hallmarks of the Roman city, particularly the good old Decumanus Maximus and Cardo, but the mosaics were naturally the highlight, and, indeed, many were really quite spiffy, including an example featuring the four seasons, or another of a drunkard which left me wincing.

I carried on pottering about, peering into different mosaiced homes along the main thoroughfare. There was a sense that these patricians had been attempting to outdo one another. Whoever did the floors of these houses must have made a roaring trade.

Particularly luxurious was a large tub with nymphs frolicking with dolphins. Tearing myself from this pleasant scene, it suddenly dawned on me that I had little time to get back to Moulay Idriss by foot before it would be dark and I would be busless. I departed the site post-haste, walking briskly along the road towards Moulay Idriss.

The screech besides me of a car halting, a muttering inside it: “Frag ihn doch.” Germans, I was saved! With little hesitation, I clambered into the car, and was whisked back to Moulay Idriss by the German-Moroccan family within. Yunus and Hamza, four year old twins squeezed in the back with me, provided the running commentary which those new to complex speech tend to delight in: “Der Papa fährt das Auto, und die Mama trägt das Kopftuch” pronounced Yunus. We all laughed. Suddenly I panicked. Ahead rumbling down the hill was my ticket back to Meknès. Fortunately, our car blocked the bus’ path. Paying no heed to a fuming driver, I waved the family farewell from the safety of a bus window, trundling homewards.

Finally returning to the riad and going through my notes, I concluded that this week had left me with a strange sense of anti-climax. Perhaps it was the general dearth of museums in Morocco, but I got the sense that I had learnt less than I had expected, at least about Phoenicians, although the DAI’s library in Madrid would rectify that. A few interesting ideas had popped into my head, but they were clearly of the “file for later” type. Noticeable rather were the inklings of those strange intangible lessons about organising a journey that increasing travel brings. My pack felt lighter, the slight stomach I had acquired over a summer of dissolute translation work was beginning to disappear, and I was beginning to get the hang of this travelling business. The next week would bring Spain and the beginnings of Portugal, provided I could wake in time for my train…