THE GAIT OF MY HORSE fell into a slow and steady rhythm as we zigzagged up through a Berber village named Marigha in the foothills of Morocco’s High Atlas range. Our small group of riders clopped alongside chest-high earthen walls that delineated garden plots shaded by olive and fruit trees. It was a bucolic moment in the soft late afternoon sun, with the calls of flitting birds and the swoosh of horse tails interrupted occasionally by the voice of an unseen person calling out to another. Above the village itself, we traversed bare, brick-colored earth limned with smooth boulders eroded by wind and rain toward our goal, a knoll, where we dismounted to appreciate the view of the Ouirgane Valley.
I had left hot, frenetic Marrakech a few days earlier for the cooler temperatures
