In search of prehistoric rock art in southern Morocco

    The shadows lengthen as the day rapidly fades on this late December afternoon, there is not much time left. It must have been half an hour now since we left the road to venture onto this dusty track, which no one seems to have used for a long time. I drive a little too fast while trying to avoid the large protruding rocks, which the dust from the windshield, made visible by the low light, prevents me from clearly distinguishing. Next to me, Youssef is strangely silent, he who earlier was relentless when it came to learnedly explaining to me the sedimentation process at the origin of the Ordovician layer in which we were digging for our trilobites’ fossils. He too must have felt that by turning on this path earlier, it was the well-marked world of academic knowledge to which he was accustomed that we had left, and that what awaited us at the end, probably would be of a completely different order.

 To the horizon, around us stretches the great yellowish sheet of the desert plain, dotted with an infinity of calcined rocks, a vestige of a volcanic rain from the depths of ages, and which the track in front of us seems to be slashing with a long, clean cut. The landscape is dead, frozen in its minerality by the gravity of time. As far as the eye can see, a field of stones, like an immense cemetery on which, at times, rises a whirlwind of dust which seems to dance in a pale imitation of life, like an echo from a forgotten era.

I stop the vehicle at the foot of a small hill, and we finish the path on foot to the top. This one is slightly rounded and covered with a crust of smooth brown rocks, like the surface of an egg cracked at the top. So, with the excitement of those who finally reach their goal after a long quest, we begin to inspect the rocks one by one. And suddenly, in the middle of this ocean of sandstone, like the glow of a campfire which warms the heart when it suddenly appears to the hiker lost in the night, a shape appears before us on a flat stone, which we recognize, instinctively, intimately, being of human origin. Even though they have disappeared for thousands of years, finding a trace of your own in the middle of a foreign world is an extraordinary sensation. It’s like finding the herd again, after having thought you were lost, alone in the middle of the immensity, joy is reborn and with it, life. Little by little, elephants emerge from the stones, gazelles leaping, slender ostriches, charging rhinoceroses, oxen with long horns, which these prehistoric artists represented by observing them parade before them. peacefully in the plain below. I sit in their place and in turn contemplate the rustling and teeming savannah which once stretched out in place of this bleak and bare desert, this great living organism whose flesh has finally dried up and blood has evaporated in the burning sands. My finger follows the curves traced in the stone, like the tip of the sapphire on the grooves of the disc, in search of the message that these men of yesterday tried to engrave there. Who were they? Did they think like us? Did they experience happiness, jealousy, sadness in the same way as us? There are no written documents to bridge the gap of our ignorance and the oral accounts of their history, passed down from generation to generation, have been lost for a long time in the deep crypts of the memory of humanity. But as my finger arrives at the crossing of the legs of a bovid, I then notice the clever process of perspective that the engraver used to make one of the legs pass in front of the other, which, in a fraction of a second cancels the seven thousand years that separate us. Men like me were there, they talked, they ate, they made a fire. One day their children took their place, had children, who themselves had children and so on up to me, what dizziness! A few meters away, Youssef, crouched contemplating a particularly striking drawing of a giraffe, holds on to the rock so as not to lose his balance, while his vain attempts to cling to his scientific detachment are of no help to him.

But already the last lights are fading on the horizon and the brightest stars are beginning to appear in the purple sky. I have to pull myself together. I take my camera and begin to photograph each petroglyph in meticulous detail, as if, forgetting that they have just passed through thousands of years, I fear that the night will make them disappear. I would like to stay longer, soak up this deep energy which radiates from these stones, this mysterious and magnetic force which seems to want to draw us ever closer to this ultimate point, which we have the intuition could contain the answer to all of our questions. But today we are not allowed to continue on this path, we must now leave the hill and return to the car.

As the trail opens up before us in the halo of headlights, I gradually regain awareness of material things like the level of my gas gauge, or my stomach which reminds me of dinner time. As if moving away from the influence of the site, the consciousness, which had contracted into an intense ball, was flowing again towards the tips of my limbs. The emotion from earlier fades in waves of decreasing intensity like the ebb of the tide. Tongues loosen and we finally talk with Youssef about what we have just seen, as if to reassure ourselves deep down that all of this was indeed real, that somewhere in the night behind us, the hill with engravings did exist. 

Probably an African wild donkey or a zebra, too soon for horses