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troubled conscience, to help me feel better about the enterprise. She showed me some rough cuts of earlier shows, pointed out that I wasn’t doing that badly, if I remembered to look at the camera, if I’d only stop cursing and smoking and slagging other Food Network chefs all the time, maybe look at a map before visiting a country. Three minutes into this motivational meeting, the producer mentioned that her boyfriend had been kidnapped by aliens. She said this casually, as if mentioning that she’d seen the Yankees/Red Sox game last week. He’d built an alien landing strip in their apartment, she added, her tone frighteningly devoid of irony or skepticism. I waited for the part where she’d say, ‘Oh yeah, I know. He’s nuts. Barking mad. But I love the big lug.’ That would have been enough for me. I waited, but nothing came. She continued gently pointing out my many deficiencies while urging me on. I think I even jokingly inquired if her boyfriend had mentioned any rectal probing being involved, a suspiciously regular feature of rural alien abductions. She didn’t laugh.

I was alone.

I spoke with Naomi before leaving, apologized for myself, thanked her for enduring the crew, and the cameras, expressed regret that I was leaving her beautiful home, and this amazing city, without really having gained any knowledge or real insight. She handed me a small piece of paper on which she’d copied a verse by Longfellow: ‘And the night shall be filled with music,/And the cares, that infest the day,/Shall fold their tents, like the Arabs/And as silently steal away.’

I hoped so. I truly did. I had very high hopes for the desert. I needed it.

It was a nine-hour drive from Fez to the desert. We passed through snowcapped mountains with Swiss-style vacation homes – a remnant of the French occupation – through forests and valleys, across the Moyen-Atlas, and down onto mile after mile of absolutely flat, hard-packed, pebble-strewn dirt. One long, undulating ribbon of asphalt stretched on and on for hundreds of miles. Occasionally, we glimpsed in the distance wadis, mesas, mountains, cliffs, great mounds of packed dirt. Every fifty miles or so, an oasis appeared. Some oases were simply small clusters of the ubiquitous sand and mud castles, while others were vast wedding cake-like Casbahs, groupings of homes and mosques, schools and markets, small plots of green crowded around tall palms, clinging to where water passed, or had once passed, or was likely to pass again. Coming from New York, one tends to take water for granted. Here in the desert, it’s life or death. One builds where water flows or trickles. One pulls it from the ground. Some of the larger oases stretched for miles in the wide, deep crevices where the earth, thousands or millions of years ago, had split open, cracked like an overcooked brownie.

I began seeing camels with regularity alongside the road, with blue- or black-clad Berbers holding the reins or riding on top. I saw women with tattooed faces in the same black or blue scarves, the colors and markings denoting tribe. And I saw something else again and again in the middle of the vast, monotonous expanses of hard, waterless desert, where for thirty miles we’d passed nothing – not a house, not a single structure, no stick of wood or blade of grass to distract the eye from horizon to horizon. There, sitting by the side of the road, were lone watchers, people who’d hiked for miles from beyond the curve of the earth to sit and watch the occasional car or truck blow past them at eighty miles an hour, never slowing. These people didn’t beg, or wave, or even raise their heads to smile. They sat impassive, watching in silence in their rags as evidence of the modern world roared past, leaving them in a cloud of dust.

Abdul owned only one cassette tape: Judy Collins’s Greatest Hits. I tried sleeping. I tried shutting it out, but, in the end, the soulless trilling and warbling of ‘Both Sides Now’ slowly ground me down to a state of near-hysterical desperation. The road to Risani seemed to go on forever – especially with Judy exercising