After climbing the dunes we started making our way by camel to the berber camp where we had planned to spend the night. As you can see in the picture, the sky was mostly clear and there was no warning of what was about to come. As Gumi, me and our 15 year-old guide Ali proceeded away from the dunes, the wind became stronger, turned cold and started flinging sand everywhere. This happened very quickly and pretty soon it got so dark I couldn’t see further than six feet in front of me. Naturally we were a bit concerned about this and asked Ali when we would be reaching the camp. He said it wasn’t far, which is Moroccan for don’t worry about it. I tried to take that suggestion on board but the sudden darkness was unsettling. In fact there was an ominous feel to the whole situation but it seemed like there was no other alternative but to trust him and keep going.
I don’t know how much further we went but night had fallen and the lights from the villages by the dunes were a long way behind us when Ali, who was a nice boy apart from nearly getting us killed, stopped the camels and confirmed our worst fears by admitting that he was lost. By now it was pitch black and the sand-filled wind was so strong it was painful on any area of the skin which was exposed. We felt rather than saw a steep incline so Ali put the camels down and we climbed a large dune to see if we could get any idea of where we were. At the top we found no lights and no stars, just a feeling of being small and helpless.
It was at this point that Ali, bless his little berber slippers, started trying to tell me something. Between the wind and his idiolect of French and English, ‘Chefe!’ (boss) and ‘Telephone!’ was all I could understand but it was enough. By a lucky coincidence, maybe even a little miracle, the manager of the tour company had given us his telephone number the day before - ‘just in case’ he said. All we needed now was signal. Teeth chattering, wind howling, and a load of other cliches that really don’t do justice to how scared I was, we switched on the phone to discover, and I say this with all sincerity - Thank the Lord - we had signal.
It took another thirty minutes and another five or six phone calls, something else I will be eternally grateful for is that we managed to do all this with only 10% of the battery, before a pair of lights appeared in the angry, swirling darkness ahead. Getting in the rough vicinity of where we were was the first problem, the second was locating our exact position and watching the 4WD come closer only for it to miss us and drive off in the opposite direction was excruciating. We tried calling and waving the back-lit screen of the iPhone in their direction to no avail; stepping into the driver’s shoes for a moment though, if the conditions were so bad that we could barely hear each other and they couldn’t even see the camels, what chance did they have of seeing us?
This time it was Gumi’s turn to have a brainwave, and for another piece of technology to come to our aid. Shouting over the wind to make herself heard, she suggested using the flash on the camera to get the driver’s attention. So I got the camera out and started taking pictures. All in all I shot twenty or thirty pictures of ‘cosmic sand’ like this one but I think it took about ten or fifteen before the twin lights of the pick-up turned towards us and this final shot is of the car pulling up at the bottom of the dune where we were standing. Relieved is not the word...
 By Tom Lloyd |
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