De Avoir peur avec élégance.
Tangier, First Light: Second Meeting
Tangier’s sprawl rises like a fever dream from the haze—minarets piercing salt-thick air, diesel fumes curling with calls to prayer and the low roar of scooters.
The Strait
The ferry takes its time. Fourteen kilometres of water between two continents, and still it behaves as if it is crossing an ocean. I stand at the rail with coffee that tastes of the engine room. Europe is still in my shoes. Tangier is already in my nose: cumin, diesel, wet rope, something frying.
Wolfgang stands half a pace behind me. He always does. Some men carry luggage; he carries distance, and knows exactly how much of it to keep.
The last time I crossed here, I was sitting in my living room and left the ordeal to Elena. Someone met her at the airport with the eyes of a customs officer who had read my diary. Tangier has not changed its mind about me since. It lets you in, then decides.
The Oasis That Keeps Moving
Zerzura has never been found, which is the only reason it has lasted.
It appears in versions of the Kitab al-Kanuz, the Book of Hidden Pearls: a treasure-seeker’s text whose instructions have travelled farther than any reliable map. A white city in the desert, a bird above its gate, a king and queen asleep inside. Follow the wadi, find the palm trees, do not trust the guide.
In the 1930s, serious men with Ford cars and aerial surveys went looking for it: Almásy, Bagnold, the gentlemen of the Zerzura Club. They mapped a great deal of the Libyan Desert and never found the city. The desert was not the problem. The problem was that they were looking for a place, when what they had was a story about wanting.
An anthropologist learns this early. Some places exist mainly as a direction people keep walking in.
A City of Guests
Tangier collects foreigners the way the medina collects cats: it does not ask where you came from, only whether you are staying for dinner.
Ibn Battuta was born here in 1304 and spent nearly thirty years proving he could leave. Matisse came for Tangier’s light in 1912. Rain kept him indoors long enough to discover that a window could contain an entire country. Mohamed Choukri arrived hungry, learned to read at twenty, and wrote For Bread Alone—the book Tangier’s respectable families would have preferred he had not.
All three are still in the walls. You sleep in rooms that remember other people’s insomnia.
The Black Heron
Inez calls after midnight, when the fan is moving warm air from one side of the room to the other and Wolfgang has stopped pretending not to listen.
The girls have got a message through. They are making progress, Inez says, but time is accelerating. The system is learning faster now—new machinery, new language, new ways of making old arrangements sound inevitable.
For a moment, neither of us says anything.
Then I tell her to send them one instruction.
Find the black heron.
It is an African bird that hunts by making its own darkness. In shallow water, it opens its wings into an umbrella, cuts the glare, and waits for the fish to enter the shade. Nobody agrees whether the fish come for shelter or whether the bird simply sees them better.
It does not matter. The method is sound.
When the light belongs to somebody else, ignite a small light of your own.
© 2026 I.Ph. de Lange All rights reserved. Published by CYcrds OÜ.
