Looping Back

The last leg back to Marrakech, a three-and-a-bit hour train ride south east from Casablanca. Hot and dehydrated from the late night before, I gave up on Emerson after half a chapter and sat for the rest of the journey propped up on my elbows staring out of the window through a sign that said second class in Arabic and French (nothing like a reminder of your status in life). Finally, at twelve o'clock, the scrub land turned to building sites, the building sites to salmon-coloured blocks of flats, blocks of flats to railway station platforms.

In the souks I felt I was back again in Sicily, the same on the brink feeling - over there, as DH Lawrence once said from his hill in Taormina, you're just one short hop from Africa; in Morocco you're the same distance away from getting back out of it: high walls and slanting alleys, scooter engines over your shoulder, cafes on the square, orange-clogged drains and the whiff of Medievalism...