Hand snorted.

"I'm not here to wait," he said. "Where are they now?"

"You look."

Hand turned around.

"They're gone!"

"What?" I looked in his rear-view mirror. "Holy shit." I looked again. "They're gone. That is amazing. Why are they gone?"

We were out of the narrow road, the walls spread; we were again on the open road, the sky open and proud.

"I really thought we were in trouble there," Hand said.

"You know, I actually think we were."

Seconds later the cabbie stopped his car. We pulled up to him. I was still jittery, half-expecting some kind of ambush. He didn't get out. He just pointed up, with his whole arm, like semaphore – this road, he indicated, all the way.

Hand paid him $100, even while we wondered if he'd intended to kill or rob us moments before. We drove a mile in silence and finally stopped on the shoulder. I rested my head on the side window. The car wheezed. I turned it off.

"Sorry," I said. "I thought -"

He stared out for a minute.

"Forget it," he said.

"You still want to go?"

"We should. I'll drive."

We got out and the air was cold and the hood hummed. We switched seats and Hand drove. Toward the mountain another ten minutes. No people anywhere, no movement.

"What did you think would happen?" Hand asked.

"I thought we'd watch each other die," I said.

The air was cooling more. The road inclined.

"I'd want to die first," he said.

"Let's not do this," I said. I must have killed those men a hundred times in those minutes. "I'm worn out."

We went on, in a few minutes stopping for gas at a brilliantly lighted station staffed by a huge blue-overalled black man – the first and only black man we'd seen or would see in Morocco – and with his mustache he very much looked like a walrus, a walrus wearing a blue jumpsuit. I went in to use the restroom and inside were three men watching TV. One said something as I left.

"What'd he say?" Hand asked.

"I heard the words 'America' and 'whore.' I think. Add a predicate and I think he insulted us."

"This is just a weird thing, this night."

"You still want to go?"

"We should."

So we went up the mountain.

We switched seats, Hand driving now, but this wasn't the poor part of town. We kept thinking it would get poor but instead the road – as much as we could see in the unlighted road – was lined for twenty miles with perfect trees planted neatly, and high walls just beyond, left and right. Gated compound after gated compound, a few clearly marked as resorts, and dozens more that were either immense private homes or military bases or huge hidden dens of intrigue – sex camps or subversive training centers or fantastic new labs where humans were being made from stem cells and extractions from ice-age holdovers. It wasn't clear to us, none of it, while speeding past, on the other side of their high and endless walls.

Then we were climbing, the road was and we with it, our path winding and without guardrails. We knew we were in the mountains when the air went cold and when our headlights illuminated the tops of trees, their brittle leaves peaking from below road level, grey photographs of branches in our passing flashes.

In the quiet dark hollow of our car, Hand was talking about the origin of AIDS, something about a truck route in Zaire. It all started with truckers, he said. The truck drivers were delivering some kind of cloth, terrycloth, he thought, up and down Zaire, and were stopping in brothels, as truckers do, thus facilitating the spread of the virus. We found ourselves over a bridge and knew we were very high above whatever we were crossing-water or dry chasm, we'd never know.

At the other side of the bridge, at one in the morning in these frozen black mountains we came upon two men in uniform, thumbs outstretched, hitchhiking. Their uniforms, different but familial, looked like military.

"Should we?" I asked.

"Man, I don't know. We've had too much tonight."

We passed them full of conflict and shame and drove up around six or seven more bends, the air getting so cool the car's windows seemed to stiffen and the sky tightened and shrank. But we saw no one. There were no shanties, no tents or tiny crumbling adobe homes. There was no one up here. There was no one living here at all, really – no one, at least, visible in the black taut overnight – no weak fires warming peasants, no clotheslines strung between hovels.

We parked on the shoulder and got out. It was twenty degrees colder up here, maybe forty degrees, and we had no jackets. With fifteen feet between us, we could barely see each other. Hand stood, fists in his pants, warming them. I stood, fingers entwined and resting on my head. We had no idea why we were here. There was no moon, no stars.

"We could drive over the side," Hand said.

"I thought of that," I said.

"If we picked the right place," he said, "the worst that would happen is we'd wreck the car."

"I know."

"It would be something to do. We'd run down a ways, hit a tree, get out, maybe meet up with those military guys and hitch back with them."

It sounded intriguing. Only laziness prevented us from doing it. We stood for a minute and I noted that there was no sound. There were no animals, no people, not even wind pushing through trees. We stood on the mountain, what we figured might be the top of the mountain, and for a second I thought I heard water, but then didn't. There was nothing. We got back in the car.

We turned around and descended and drove quickly, back over the bridge high over the river canyon, past the military men again, still standing where we'd passed them, on the cusp of the bridge, and we rolled and down and down and they stayed there and we didn't know how they could stand the cold.

In fifteen minutes we reached level ground again and were blowing through a flat road lined with trees straight perfectly spaced.

"There's a guy," said Hand.

I slowed down;

"Where?"

"Back there, a guy walking with a huge staff in his hand."

I backed up for a few hundred yards until I could see him. A man in the snug wool clothes of someone who lives outdoors and hikes constantly – completely self-sufficient, but carrying next to nothing. His backpack, leather, was small, mall-girl decorative. We stopped. The man stopped. I gave a stack of bills to Hand.

"You do it," he said.

"No. Please. I feel so weird."

"Well, stop feeling weird."

"He'd be scared of me, anyway."

"Fine."

Hand got out, carrying about $500 in Moroccan cash. He approached the man and asked directions to Marrakesh. The man looked at Hand like he was mad, or an apparition. There was only one road to Marrakesh from whence we came, and we were on it; we were obviously heading straight for Marrakesh. Hand did the thing where he pointed down the road, as if to say, If I understand you right -- and I think I do -- we just follow this road and we'll hit Marrakesh, like you say. The man nodded again and made a javelin of his arm, aiming it toward Marrakesh.

Hand pulled out the bills. For some reason – the dark? – he held them up in front of the man's face, as if the man had never seen money before, or was far-sighted. The man refused the bills and tried to walk away. Hand stepped in front of him and insisted. The man took the wad like he'd been asked to carry someone's trash. Then he continued walking.

Hand jogged back to the warm car.

"That seemed weird," I said.

"Yeah, he didn't even count it or anything. He just put it in his pocket and kept walking."

"He'll use it."

"I don't know. I don't think he'll keep it. He seems like the kind of guy who'd give it to someone else. He was like someone out of Middle Earth – a man and his staff, walking through the countryside in the middle of the night."