Change In Plans

This very short post is about the abandoned water wells in the desert, beside the road, near Al Jora, Morocco.

We are driving west, from the edge of the Sahara up into the highlands. Just outside of the town of Al Jora, the landscape next to the road is dotted with scores of small hills with flat tops. They look like tiny volcano craters (or rounded termite mounds): about 6-8 feet high, and maybe 20 feet in circumference. They stretch several hundred yards in every direction. The desert around them is flat and brown and dry (as you might expect).

These are all abandoned wells. We got out to look, and discovered that there is a hole (2-3 feet across)in the cone of each hill. The hole descends into blackness. We asked our guide, who said that each well is roughly 200 feet deep, and dry at the bottom. They had been used over hundreds of years to irrigate nearby fields and provide drinking water. When I pitched in a large stone, we did not hear it hit.

Having small kids around all of these abandoned wells triggered some kind of deep-evolution parental protection response in both India and me. Neither of us is a particularly nervous parent, but our hearts raced, we maintained physical contact with each child, and basically wanted to just get out of there. It was a very strange sensation, as if we had somehow stumbled into a room of loaded pistols. A parental nightmare, in the literal sense, would be running amidst these wells, searching for a lost child. I shudder at the thought.

One hundred yards up the road from where we stopped, still amidst the wells, was a Berber-tented ‘rest stop,’ serving tea and selling souvenirs. Ironically, the sign for the rest stop read “Place of Relaxation.” Not for parents of young kids, I’m afraid.