Showing posts with label North ; Africa ; Maghreb ; Morocco ; High Atlas ; Mountains ; Berber; people; family; Victor Englebert; National Geographic ; photo; photograph; image. Show all posts
Showing posts with label North ; Africa ; Maghreb ; Morocco ; High Atlas ; Mountains ; Berber; people; family; Victor Englebert; National Geographic ; photo; photograph; image. Show all posts

Thursday, April 3, 2014

When Travel Was Fun

In 1967 I spent four months riding a mule in Morocco’s High Atlas Mountains to photograph its Berber inhabitants and their daily lives. At the top of those mountains my mule got stuck in the snow and would not make another step forward.  Fortunately, a man in his late thirties had come up the same path as mine. When he caught up with me he helped me free the mule and guided me to his house. He informed me that the pass we had just gone through had become impassable, as would be the one to which I was now headed.

I spent eight days with his family, waiting for snow conditions to change. They did so only when a group of men went to shovel a path through it.

My host had two wives. Not because he wanted to, but because his 30-year-old wife had asked him to get her some help with her daily domestic chores. His second wife, only 18, got along wonderfully with the first wife and the couple’s teenage daughter. So much so that they laughed a lot, often at his expenses. This made him very uneasy.

While the women worked in the kitchen, my host and I sat on carpets a floor above them, eating dates and drinking sweet green tea. But every time he heard the women laugh he stuck his ear to the ground to try to hear if it was about him. Then he looked at me sheepishly and shrugged.

National Geographic gave my story the cover of its June 1968 issue—the second of nine stories of mine they would publish.
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En 1967 j’ai passé quatre mois à dos de mulet dans le Haut-Atlas marocain pour y photographier ses habitants berbères et leur vie quotidienne.  Au sommet de ces montagnes ma monture  s’enfonça dans la neige jusqu’au ventre et ne put faire un pas de plus. Heureusement un homme arriva, qui m’avait suivi de loin. Il m’aida à sortir le mulet de son pétrin et m’informa de ce que la neige avait bloqué le col que je venais de passer et que je trouverais celui où je me dirigeais également impassable.

Je dus passer huit jours dans sa maison jusqu’à ce que plusieurs hommes s’en fussent m’ouvrir un passage à la pelle.

Mon hôte avait deux femmes. Pas son choix mais celui de sa femme de 34 ans. Lasse des ingrates corvées domestiques elle lui avait demandé de se trouver une deuxième épouse. Celle-ci n’avait que 18 ans, mais elle s’entendait à merveille avec la première, ainsi qu’avec la fille adolescente du couple.  A tel point qu’elles ne faisaient que rire, souvent aux dépens du seul homme de la maison, ce qui le gênait beaucoup.

Tandis que les femmes travaillaient dans la cuisine, mon hôte et moi, assis sur des tapis à l’étage supérieur, mangions des dates et buvions du thé vert sucré. Mais chaque fois qu’un éclat de rire nous parvenait d’en bas, il collait rapidement son oreille au plancher pour essayer d’en connaitre le sujet. Puis il se tournait vers moi et haussait les épaules.


National Geographic donna à mon histoire la couverture de son numéro de juin 1968. Ce magazine publierait neuf de mes histoires de voyage.