Dear Reader,
There are no buses to Imelghas, so we squeeze into a communal taxi at Azilal. There are six of us in all, each one anxious to reach Aït Bou Guemez (about 100km east of Marrakech as the Bonelli’s eagle flies) before the sun sets and the High Atlas Mountains plunge into freezing darkness. As is the norm these days, we must either share the four passenger seats or walk. Long ago we did walk, but that was before the new tarmac strip joined the concrete towns of the northern plains with bustling Souk el Had, our valley’s precious weekly market.
Imelghas’ physical isolation testifies to the stories of the earliest settlement of Aït Bou Guemez, ‘the people of the scratching man’. Legend tells of one who, cursed by a terrible skin condition, left his own folk and sought this remote, uninhabited corner of the Atlas to avoid spreading his affliction. There are certainly no signs of such suffering here today. Indeed, French trekkers have aptly nicknamed the place ‘la vallée heureuse’ (‘the happy valley’).