Edith

After reading about Ester Blenda Nordström, I discovered Edith Wharton who also travelled the world on her own a hundred years ago. Taking the boat from Algeciras in the closing hours of the First World War, her travel writing begins with an excuse for the fact she would only spend a month in Morocco, thus making “precise observation difficult”.

“To step aboard a steamer in a Spanish port, and three hours later to land in a country without a guide-book, is a sensation to rouse the hunger of the repletest sight-seer”

As for the road to Marrakech, Edith writes that as long as it “runs in sight of the Atlantic breakers they give the scene freshness and life, but when it bends inland and stretches away across the wilderness the sense of the immensity and immobility of Africa descends on one with an intolerable oppression”. Hopefully, the same does not hold true for Norwegian flight DY4527. Still, I too yearn to finally return to Marrakech’s “red wall across a red wilderness”.