Sand and Snow  

From sand to snow is not such a long step: just 249 miles, the distance between the mouth of the Draa and Tizi n-Test, the highest pass in Morocco (6,890 feet) on the High Adas. And here is the third Morocco, that of the mountains: a not very African world which in spring turns all shades of green. Up there are orchards with almond and fig trees, forests of cedar and oak, even winter-sports resorts, with ski-lifts and ski runs: Ketama in the Rif Mountains, Oukaimeden in the High Adas, Ifrane in the Middle Atlas. The last is the most unusual: a Swiss-style village where you sleep in unlikely Alpine chalets and ski in woods inhabited by monkeys. This too, like it or not, is Morocco. Of course the traditional architecture of the Magreb mountains is different: the kasbah, the ksour and the irhrem scattered mainly in the valleys of the south. The kasbah are military forts, built by the ancient lords; the ksour (singular ksar) are villages enclosed in mud walls; lasdy the irhem (or agadir) are fortified granaries still used to store crops, even though the risk of robbery is no longer a problem. The most famous area for this architecture is the Dades valley, north-east of Ouarzazate, called the "valley of a thousand kasbahs". The most intact ksour are set amidst the pink granites of the Anti-Adas, reached on dirtroads where only donkeys and four-wheel drive can pass.

Ksour and chalets, donkeys and ski-lifts: the Moroccan mountains are by no means all the same; nor could they be, stretching as they do from the Mediterranean to the Sahara. But they do have one thing in common: among the furrows and canyons of the mountains live communities of Berbers, descendants of the most ancient inhabitants of the Maghreb, who took the religion of the Arabs but often not the customs, nor the language, nor the designs of the rugs. They are famous for their silver jewellery, for the coloured veils worn by the women, for their fanciful legends, and for their rugs, coarse to the touch, with diamond-shaped designs, whose colours differ from place to place: beige prevails in the Middle Adas, red and ochre in the High Adas; red-white-blue towards Ouarzazate.