Should we compare a peak to a dune and a dune to a peak?
That is the question I’m asking myself while boarding on the flight to Morocco.

You can’t imagine the sky seen from a tent if you’ve never experienced it. It’s like a real hug, a roof that gives you the sense of security, of being at home.
In the desert the result is 100 times amplified.
Therefore, I think that in order to deeply understand all the things we are surrounded by, we need to know what’s on the other side.
It’s as knowledge were something made from a balance between opposite things.
I can confirm that sleeping underneath a starry sky of an Iranian village is not the same as sleeping in the dunes of Sahara.
Climbing a dune doesn’t require the same effort and coordination as the ones you need to reach a mountain covered with snow in the Caucasus.
Let’s think about the elements, sand and snow, there’s a huge difference between the two of them, but in both cases you walk with a clumsy and funny steps.
On the sand you can roll over and laugh, it is a place where there’s only sand and sky, a blue one without any cloud.
Probably you can’t have an idea of what a big city is, if you’ve never slept in the desert, therefore who lives in the desert doesn’t know much about himself till he visits a big city.

The Atlas is a mountain range that rises up between the Atlantic Ocean on the west and the Moroccan desert which extends till the borders of Algeria on the east.
I left home curious, as always. The desert empties your head, it is too extended and it is not a place of thoughts, but a place where, at the first look, it is impossible to orient yourself and think.
I met beautiful families with expressive faces and new stories to tell, people to whom I would have asked many things, but the language didn’t allow me to do that, so the silence went well too, which anyway is not empty at all.

Altripiani, in this short African chapter, went to meet Berber people.
It traveled new paths and a long road towards that border (which exist on maps only) between Morocco and Algeria.