Midnight Train to Tangier
By Owen Clarke
The train left Marrakech at 21:00 and was due to arrive at 06:30 in Tangier. It cost 200 dirhams one way, which was around twenty US dollars.
Houston and I paid our fees and got on, clutching the jumble of papers the woman in the booth had given us. One was a ticket, one was a receipt, one appeared to be a coupon for a restaurant, one was some sort of government advisory, and the fifth was entirely in Arabic and indecipherable.
The floor of the railcar hallway was littered with cigarette butts, the windows stained yellow from smoke and sweat. A poster was plastered on the wall, depicting a cigarette covered by a large red X. A lanky conductor took one of my slips of paper, tore it in half, then took another and stuffed it into his front pocket. He pointed me to a cabin at the end of the car, Houston to one near the front.
“We bought our tickets together,” I said, pointing to my friend. “We’re riding together, right?”
The man shook his head and ushered me down the hallway. I stepped into a car with four bunks, two stacked on each wall. A man lay on his back on the bottom berth, sweating voraciously. The conductor gestured for me to take the top one. I slung my pack onto the bed, then my body.
It was half an hour before the train jerked to a start and rattled away into the night.
I had just come from a winter climb of Djebel Toubkal, the highest peak in Morocco at 4,167 m (13,671 ft), and was feeling rather odd in the aftermath. On my way down from the summit, a man climbing behind me slipped and fell through a snow cornice, plummeting off the ridge. I hadn’t seen it happen, hadn’t heard it happen, but it had, in fact, happened.
I turned around a few moments later and he was gone.
The winds were high and the visibility was bad, and I couldn’t see his body. My Berber porter spoke to me about it when I got back to the stone refuge at the top of the valley. He told me the man’s face had caved in from impact with the rocks below. He was faceless, his head an open maw. He lived for a while but never regained consciousness.
I had met the man at dinner in the refuge the night before. We shared soup. His name was Peter, or Paul, something like that. It stuck in my head.
I stretched to the end of my bunk on the train and peeled back the dingy maroon curtains, which were slightly wet with some unknown substance. The world was whisking by in that manner unique to train rides, like someone flipping through a picture book too quickly. It was unbearably hot in the car. I was still wearing the clothes I’d come off the mountain in, and I knew I must stink fearsomely because my own stench was nauseating.
I peeled off my shirt and lay on the thin, yellowing sheet. I wondered if Houston’s cabin had a spare bunk.
I hopped down from the bunk, barefooted, and immediately felt a sharp pain in my heel, as if I’d landed on a rock. I almost lost my balance but caught myself. My foot throbbing, I shined my cell phone’s light on the ground with my cell phone. The floor of the cabin was littered with what looked like small stones. I heard a spitting noise, and another rolled onto the floor. The man on the bunk beneath held a plastic mesh bag of dates, and was popping them into his mouth and spitting out the pits on the floor of the cabin. He flashed a row of jagged teeth at me and offered a “Salaam.”
He held out the bag. I took a date and sucked on it. I’d always liked dates, but there was something about them that warned against overindulgence. The fruit of a date, especially when eaten in a place like a humid train car, is sickly sweet, almost fleshy.
It felt sinful. And I didn’t even know if I believed in sin.
“My name is Owen,” I said.
He nodded, made a clicking sound. “Mourad.”
“Nice to meet you.”
The train went around a sharp bend and I staggered to the side, stepped on a date pit, and smacked my head on the wall. To his credit, the man didn’t smile at this Looney Tunes-esque performance. I sat down on the bunk opposite.
“You are English?” he said.
“American.”
He nodded and slid another date into his mouth, almost erotically tonguing the fruit. The conductor plodded down the hallway and stuck his head into the compartment, like a mother checking on two kids at a sleepover. He moved on up the car.
“I came from Toubkal,” I told him. “The mountain.”
“Ahh, Toubkal?” he said. “Top?”
“Yes,” I said.
Mourad nodded. He stuck his hand into the side slit of his djellaba and scratched his stomach. “You are married?” he asked after a moment.
“No, no. I am only twenty,” I said.
Mourad shrugged. “When you are married, you must find a beautiful wife.”
“Do you have a wife?” I asked.
“Yes,” said Mourad. He continued, “You must find a beautiful woman. A wife.”
“I hope so,” I said. “If I find her, I’ll invite you to the wedding.”
He was not listening. “You cannot change beauty,” he continued. “Even when they are old, it does not change. Beautiful. Mean, angry, dumb, you can change.” He held up his fingers and counted them off. “Lazy, boring, you can change. Beauty you cannot change. A pretty woman, everyone sees. She knows. They know. You see her. Know her.”
He held up two fingers to his eyes then pointed away, the ‘I See You’ gesture. “You find her beautiful, you love her.”
“I understand,” I said.
I didn’t, but perhaps I wanted to. I wondered what Houston was doing.
“Why are you going to Tangier?” I asked.
“I am going,” he said, nodding. “To Tangier.”
“Yes,” I said. “Why?”
“I am hungry,” he said, laughing and rubbing his stomach. “Eat.”
I couldn’t fathom the logic behind a nine-hour train ride for a bite to eat. I must have misunderstood.
I opened a notebook and wrote in it for a while. Mourad put away his bag of dates and fell asleep. Soon he was snoring loudly. I couldn’t take this after a while, so I unstrapped my ice axe from my pack and dropped it onto the floor of the cabin. The clattering woke him up. I pretended it had been an accident.
“Sorry,” I said.
I stayed up a long time after that, agonizing over whether I’d tipped my Berber porter enough on Toubkal. I came to the conclusion that I had not.
When we pulled into Tangier in the morning, I had only slept for a couple of hours. Mourad was nowhere to be found. His date pits remained.
Owen Clarke is a freelance journalist, motorcyclist, and mountaineer, and the founder of this publication. You can find his work on his website.
