Morocco: the Crumbling Kasbah of Telouet by Brendan Sainsbury

Picture a castle, deserted and abandoned, succumbing slowly to the ravages of time. Picture a labyrinth of opulent rooms, wrecked and looted, flickering with just the smallest hint of their former greatness. Picture a ruined old man - the once exalted Pasha of Marrakech, the undisputed Lord of the Atlas, entertainer of kings and queens, Hollywood movie icons, writers, scribes, diplomats - turning restlessly in his dusty grave. Picture a journey...

I re-adjust my grip as the car rattles unhealthily along the road into Telouet through a landscape of dusty browns and copper reds, the square flat-roofed houses stacked up like cardboard boxes on the hillside.

"Yallah, yallah." Beside me my driver Mustafa is sitting hunched over the steering wheel, yelling in the manner of a Moroccan goat-herder as the exhaust makes another violent choking sound. Sensing my alarm he slips me a covert glance - a smile, measured, challenging - taking his eyes off the road for at least five seconds longer than is necessary.

"You know, Engleesh......” he calls out with a kind of child-like glee, "In Arabic one yallah means: let's go. Two means: let's get bluddy move on!" "What about three Yallahs?" I yell over the din.

But Mustafa just snorts and ducks the question. For business reasons he has gleaned - quite accurately as it turns out - that an aura of comforting reassurance goes a long way in securing a large and generous tip. "Ha! Don't worry, be 'appy, mon ami", he laughs, with a nonchalant wave of the hand, "This car is good car. Mustafa will get you there before dark, no problem." He winds down his window, summons up something awful and phlegm-like from his throat and spits skillfully into the fresh mountain air. "Inshallah,” he adds, almost as an afterthought.

With a dreamy detachment I gaze wistfully through the windscreen at the green terraced fields growing lusher by the minute. The route is narrow and precipitous, a snaking thin ribbon of grey tarmac through the strange and colourful landscape. And then, quite suddenly, our first glimpse of the mysterious Kasbah, rising like an eagle's nest above the tiny village of Telouet - a castle of intense power and a thousand untold secrets, a palace built for the legendary Lords of the Atlas.

At the Auberge Telouet we stop briefly for the traditional Berber tea drinking ritual. With an earnest smile the owner comes out to greet us, barking orders at a small assistant in a turban who scurries around in the background brandishing a silver tray with an antique teapot balanced precariously on top.

"As-salaam alaykum." "Wa-alaykum as-salaam." The greetings take about five minutes. We kiss each other twice on each cheek. Mustafa adds a huge bear hug into the bargain. The owner laughs heartily and shouts out something in Arabic and, as if by magic, the turbaned man appears again with a freshly filled teapot and three small glasses full of mint tea - and the obligatory Berber carpet.

"Woven with great beauty" croaks the owner, inadvertently showing me the full shocking results of 50 years of bad dentistry, "I make you very good price." He nearly does. But somehow the lure of the castle mixed with the repugnance of his teeth get the better of me. It's walking distance from here. With unbridled excitement I trudge on foot down the long drive to a huge wooden door, Mustafa still panting beside me.

"You know Engleesh,” he proffers, breathing hard, with a sudden sense of foreboding, "The Guardian - sometimes he not in". "What?" Mustafa starts to look dejected and shifty, secretly cursing the stupid, over-inquisitive Englishman who has dragged him here in the first place. The castle, it appears, doesn't have an entry booth. Rather it relies on the voluntary services of a so-called guardian - an aged Berber, more often than not - who shuffles around in a hooded Djellaba and flashes out his grubby hand for a tip as you exit.

Abandoned in 1956 when the disgraced Glaoui clan fell in the wake of Moroccan independence, Telouet has subsequently been left to rot, to disintegrate piece by piece into the sandy dust of the desert. It languishes like a museum with a never-ending selection of changing exhibits - a dissolved adobe wall here, a fallen turret there, another chunk of priceless Atlas marble given over to the stork’s nests. For me, though, that was all part of the attraction. Back at the gate the lugubrious Guardian finally shows up and lets us in. Dwarfed by the huge doors he looks faintly surreal standing in the sloping cobbled courtyard clasping in his hands the largest set of keys I've ever seen. "Par ici ", he grunts pointing to a dark inner vestibule, a hint of Rocky Horror emanating from his incommunicative tone. Mustafa leads the way. I follow.

The history of Telouet, the once resplendent Glaoui Kasbah, is both short and bloody. In 1893 – long before the Kasbah itself was built - the army of the Moroccan Sultan, Moulay Hassan, was tracking back across the Atlas Mountains after a disruptive tax-collecting mission amongst the hostile tribes of the Sahara. Half-frozen by the weather and on the point of collapse the men unwittingly found themselves at the mercy of the infamous Glaoui, the wild clan who claimed exclusive territorial rights over the Tizi-n-tichka pass and the road back to Marrakech.

But the Glauoi had other plans. Led by two scheming brothers, T'hami and Madani, the errant warriors saw an opportunity too good to miss. Rather than looting and dismembering the Sultan's ailing army, as had previously been their custom, they offered out the olive branch of food, shelter and safe passage. The skullduggery worked. The dilapidated army was wined, dined and entertained to their heart’s content. And, in exchange for the brother's "generosity", the aged and dying Sultan rather foolishly left them with a parting gift: a state-of-the-art British cannon.

It was a costly mistake. The Glaoui - who had previously been more attuned to decapitating their enemies – had never seen a cannon before. They promptly went off and blew a hole in every Kasbah between Telouet and Timbuktu. A monster had been unleashed.

"That man T'hami," begins Mustafa, rubbing his nose with the back of his hand, as we enter the haunting and mildewed suite of reception rooms. "Back then he was very powerful man, very evil man." Imperceptibly he shimmies up on my left side as I gaze up at the intricately carved cedar-wood ceiling and sticks his face about three millimeters away from my own.

"Once upon a time Engleesh," he whispers accusingly, jabbing a chubby finger towards my chest, "He was invited to the coronation of your queen.” I try to look suitably surprised but I've already done my homework. I know the whole rags to riches Glaoui tale off by heart. The heads on spikes in Marrakech interplaced with the weekends spent hobnobbing with European royalty. The hundreds of slaves who were crammed into the dungeons of Telouet castle whilst Hollywood actors (Edward G Robinson was T'hami's brother-in-law) and French diplomats sipped champagne upstairs.

For the Glaoui, the cannon was merely the spark that lit the powder peg. With the arrival of the French in 1912 the two ambitious brothers, inspired somewhat by the disruptive power of their hidden weapon, decided to take things a stage further. The new French administrators were duped as quickly as the old. The Glaoui were supplied with arms and money and, in return for promises to "pacify the southern tribes", the brothers were given free rein to do pretty much as they pleased in the territories south of Marrakech.

And they did just that. Over the next 40 years T'hami el-Glaoui ruled the land between the Atlas and the Sahara as his own personal fiefdom and out-shone even the Sultan himself. Famous for his lavish parties - which he hosted at the opulent Kasbah that he had proceeded to build for himself at Telouet - he became skillfully adept at toasting celebrities with one hand whilst he raped, pillaged and murdered with the other. In polite circles he became the talk of Paris, an engaging maverick who had bribed his way onto the celebrity A-list. Amongst the anarchic and short-changed tribes of the Atlas, meanwhile, he remained reviled and feared.

"He was a traitor, too," says Mustafa, as he takes in the delicate beauty of Telouet's elaborate tile and stucco-work, a faint sneer forming upon his face, "He stole from the people so he could live like a king. He was worse than the French." Moroccans today are notoriously cynical about the Glaoui myth and its burgeoning value as a tourist draw card. And this in part helps to explain the rapid and unchecked disintegration of the Kasbah itself. It's difficult to blame them. T'hami's nemesis finally came in 1956. Abandoned by the retreating French and branded a traitor by the nationalists, he died a broken man a few months after the declaration of independence. The lynch mobs of Marrakech had arrived a shade too late. For many it seemed as if real justice would never be done.

Clambering up onto the castle's roof we treat ourselves to a view of stark, spectacular beauty; the snow-capped Atlas Mountains shimmering in the distance, the village quiet and dormant with its ochre minaret immediately below, the only sounds those of the cawing crows and the frenzied efforts of Mustafa searching in his pockets for a cigarette.

From up here, for one encapsulated moment, it seems wholly appropriate that the ruins of Telouet might one day disappear off the face of the earth - blow like scattered ashes across the deserts of southern Morocco or sink like the stricken Titanic into the abyss of a watery grave.

Mustafa lights a cigarette and flicks the ash absent-mindedly over the ramparts as we both stand silently soaking up the dramatic vista, lost in our own private thoughts. And barely distinguishable in the village down below small lights start to flicker and a long, low, mournful wail emanates from the tiny mosque, calling the Muslim faithful to prayer.

The wind whips up, drops of rain fill the sky and, carelessly tossing his cigarette butt through a broken skylight Mustafa saunters noisily over towards the stairs and beckons me to follow. "Where are you going?” I ask, innocently. There is a look of silent mirth etched upon his face. "Yallah, Yallah, Yallah."

"I'm sorry, what does that mean?" "It means; let's get the hell out of this place, Engleesh. I have brother in village who sells Berber carpet well cheap. He will make you very good price... Come. " Behind us the once-glorious Kasbah of Telouet continues to crumble.