Morocco, in Brazil

Unzipping the tent flaps the dune appeared closer and taller than when seen in daylight, like something threatening using darkness as cover for stealth.

There was the silhouette of a tree.

A few stars.

I was in Brazil, the trees dripping with the morning’s downpour. But the words “remote desert” in a news article had prompted this mind’s flight to a night in the Sahara months ago.

I had awoken because of a droning hum. I could not place it at first. Such a strange sound, the constancy of it transfixed me. No change in pitch, no ebbs and flows, just an industrial insistence. The flipping of a switch might have turned it off. It was scouring the bones of the earth, but not the earth here – the sand moved only very lightly near my feet.

Or maybe I was wrong, untutored. Was this how secrets passed across the Maghreb? Maybe this wind carried subtleties only the sand and trees understood.

Walking as far as the dune, my feet stumbling through fine powder, I never felt I was getting closer to what I sought. The wind was not something I was in, or even surrounded by, it was something always one step ahead, beckoning me to follow.

The secrets will be told to you if only you follow me.

I understood now why so many desert travelers were lost forever on night wanderings.

But I resisted the power, and returned to my tent.

*

And from that unbidden reverie of a an eerie night, in the humid effulgence of a Rio de Janeiro summer, come other memories of dunes, dust and limestone, of red rock and black basalt.

I remember the old date traders in the market, faces like their produce: dark-brown and lined, both records of a sun-hammered life.

The crunch of my boots on stony rubble in the Ziz Valley and the feeling I could walk for years without stopping.

The way the spiny trees clung to the gorges, winning at survival, and on the plains the bleached, death masks of the camels, who had lost.

The tuning up twang of an instrument behind mud ramparts.

A lake, and a strange sunset like sulphur.

To be able to cherish this Eden of Brazil, to reach back into memory and attain the full clarity of a loved place from a loved place, and to know that despite the jungle surrounding me Bruce Chatwin was right – “Paradise never was a garden but a waste of white thorns.”

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