How to make a MOROCCAN MOSAIC
On the edge of Merzouga, seemingly suspended between the life of this village and the emptiness of the Sahara, lay a garden. Beyond the waist-high clay walls – built to keep the swirling sand off the crops – the desert rose up, shimmering in the blinding, mid-morning haze. The 150-metre-high dunes sizzled with heat. They looked so different to those we’d explored the previous evening, when the fine sand was rose gold and the air cooler with the promise of night.
So it goes in the Sahara, where the dunes constantly change shape and colour. In fact, most of this desert is not really dunes at all but rocky plateaus. Here where we were, in the far east of the country, it’s the archetypal desert we know from movies and paintings. The same desert that haunts the imagination and whose call you cannot deny, wherever you go in Morocco.
Compared to the uninviting expanse of, that sprung four kilometres away and surfaced just outside it. Our group of five followed our guide, Abdul El Ghali, into the garden. We were greeted by twittering birds and a drop in temperature.
