Tangier by Angus Stewart

I showed Katie to the bedroom. Hugh and I settled down in sleeping bags on the floor of the salon . It was about 2.00 a.m. Almost immediately Hugh fell asleep. Katie was presumably sleeping soundly in the bedroom. The excitement of the night club and oddity of the present situation combined to keep me awake. A match flared followed by the smell of burning kif ,a drug I'd not myself indulged in at this date, and which the boy didn't smoke either. There was no longer any doubt as to which lump was who. Smoking as well as eating and drinking is proscribed during the daylight hours of Ramadan. My senior Moroccan guest was, as it were smoking grass while the moon shone. But then he stood up with a grunt. I turned on my torch. Happily I recognized the Moghrebi word for 'piss'. But was my guest's request euphemism for a shit? Between ourselves and the lavatory were two warped, creaking doors - and a sleeping Katie. On the other hand nothing stood between us and the terrace except a well-oiled french window - and a host's conscience. Nor did the dilemma end there, Should the countryman in fact want to defecate, a subsequent absolute requirement would be water with which to wash his left hand. Katie must then be woken anyway, my Moroccan guest having been insulted unnecessarily. I gambled on the man's word. Idiotically repeating the word 'Piss?' I guided him apologetically to the terrace, gave him the torch, and slunk in to my sleeping bag. Within moments he was back beneath his blanket, comfortably snoring.
    But now to the fragmented memories of the night club and my sense of being a scarcely adequate host was added the image, at once absurd as it struck me as pathetic, of the djibli squatting. as he would do to urinate, on a terrace on top of Tangier's Lottery Building lit up by the alternating red and green neon sign announcing the adjacent Tanger Hotel; a sign which for all its Arabic translation neither he nor his soncould read. 3.00 a.m. is said to be the nadir of a man's morale. At 3.00 a.m. my guest hawked noisily and got up from the sofa again, Deliberately I closed my eyes a moment. The concentration resulted in my having rapidly to turn my head from the probing torch; I was grinning too broadly for propriety. Equally involuntarily the grin shrank to a frown. The djibala were unlikely to get, or volunteer for, prostate operations. I got up and switched on the light: a ceiling-hung Spanish chandelier, an enormous weight of cut glass whirls produced brilliant illumination although only one of its ten bulbs was in commission.
    My guest commenced to shake the blanket-hidden form of his son none too gently. I watched, intrigued. Moroccans changing, or endeavouring to change worlds, and Niñ was to go far, have a genius for sleep, additional even to the physiological languor accompanying puberty. Or so it had always appeared to a sentimental insomniac. Niñ had slept many fifteen-hour stretches, immovable. Now he wasawake arid up with alacrity.
    'Angus -food,' he explained in the bastardized Moghrebi we used. 'Father and me.'
    I was beyond incredulity. 3.15 a.m.! Then I remembered Ramadan. They must eat again before sunrise. Though I didn't know it at the time, having yet to make the trek, father had a bus journey followed by an eighteen-mile overland walk before him. I knocked on Katie's door. She woke to instant life and understanding as an SRN can. The road to kitchen and bathroom was open. And so two emergency trained Nsara and one natural insomniac sat sipping thick English tea in my salon while a chicken was slain and a tajine rapidly and unfamiliarly cooked by two Moroccan males before the critical rising of the sun.
    It could not have been a more authentic introduction to Morocco for Hugh and Katie.
     
     

6. Kif
     
    My curiosity about hemp is its precipitating instant, controlled psychosis. The gut is gently busied and flushed by syrup of figs. Hemp does the same for the mind. Popular fear of cannabis is probably as