Morocco

Fly in over Morocco and the first thing the country gives you is not a coast but a wall.

The Atlas, white even in June, is thrown across the whole of the land's back like a closed door. Atlas Greaves follows that spine of rock from the Atlantic surf to the edge of the Sahara, and finds in it the key to everything: why the rain falls on one side and the desert waits on the other, why the mountain kept its own tongue while the plains changed gods and masters, why the hard poor south has ruled the rich wet north for a thousand years, and why a country divided by stone learned, above all, to cross.

From the storytellers of Marrakech to a wedding in the high snow, from the copper bowl that times an oasis to the boats that leave Tangier in the dark, this is Morocco read as it deserves to be read: as land, as history, as life.

The second volume of The Far Countries.