The golden mask of Tutankhamen seems a strange place to start a page about our man in Tangiers, in Morocco.  The connection here is the rich blue gemstone that adorns his face. Lapis Lazuli. A gemstone mined in the Eastern Mountains of Egypt in the reign of the Pharaoh, and used for jewellery and ground into a pigment for the deepest blue paint.

     The Ancient Egyptians placed great store in the immense magical power of gemstones to protect and heal the body and soul. Lapis Lazuli was used to stimulate the mind of the Pharaoh and keep him safe on his perilous journey through the abode of the dead in the afterlife.

       The ability of Lapis Lazuli to stimulate the higher faculties of  the mind has been a trade secret for many years among the paranormal fraternity, but to the modern day Egyptians the gemstone was simply a must-have item to demonstrate their wealth and social standing. The larger piece the better.

       Now it just so happened that an associate in the Gemstone business was in China at the time of the Russian Afghan War and he stumbled on a huge pile of Lapis Lazuli carvings, cheap. Afghanistan is the world's biggest supplier of this beautiful gemstone, and the Afghans needed money to fight the war so they mined vast quantities of it and sold it to the Chinese, cheap, who carved it into various animals and abstract display pieces, cheap.

     My friend bought every single item, and shipped them back to England, a whole room full of fabulous carvings, but he forgot one important thing. The English have no idea what Lapis Lazuli is, or how valuable it is, and he was stuck with something he couldn't sell at any price.   Fortunately, for him, I was on hand to rescue him, because I knew who would give their eye teeth for the stuff.

     That is how I got into gemstone dealing in Egypt and at one time there wasn't a single Jeweller's shop in the whole of Upper Egypt that didn't have one of our Lapis carvings in their shop window.

      So, one thing lead to another, and as the word spread we began to travel elsewhere, which found us on a quick trip to see our man in Tangiers to acquire some rare geological quartz geodes from the Atlas mountains.

      What of Tangiers?. Tangiers is a God forsaken place in my book. The inhabitants are a miserable foul-mouthed lot who openly abuse you with the finest four letter Anglo Saxon expletives should you decline to use their services as a guide or refuse to buy a souvenir from them, and compared to my beautiful Egyptian Arabic their brand of Arabic was definitely down market.

       One day, in the local market, Sandra put her hand in her pocket and found herself holding hands with a young pickpocket, who didn't appreciate being caught, and there was no sympathy from the local shopkeepers who helped him escape. They were all in on the game of fleecing foreign tourists. And as for food, breakfast, every day, was a cup of coffee and a Croissant. No wonder the locals are such a lot of miserable individuals. Tangiers made us yearn for the every day hassle of a local Egyptian Souk (Market) where at least the locals spoke English and not French, and one could get bacon and eggs at the Hilton.

 

 

    As everywhere, though, one or two of the locals were charming and trustworthy, as was Jimmy, our man in Tangiers and owner of the notorious Hotel Continental on the Harbour waterfront. Entrepreneur Jimmy had the contacts for anything, anywhere, anytime and soon steered us in the right direction for gemstone dealers and antiques. Had we been in Casablanca our Jimmy would have made a great Humphrey Bogart.

   Our appointed guide for the duration was Mohammed, who opened up many a door for us after finally understanding what it was we really wanted from Morocco.  We wanted rocks.  Rocks?   Yes, rocks, fossils, rough gemstones.

    He arranged for trips into the Atlas Mountains and local tribal villages and we even managed to visit the impressive Caves of Hercules on the Atlantic Coast, which although originally natural sea caves, they had been vastly enlarged by the carving of thousands of millstones from inside the gritty limestone cave.

   The caves have been used as dwellings for millennia, (from BC 6000) and there are several quarries and passages between them. Only a small percentage of the caves are open to visitors. The Caves of Hercules are reputed to have been the home of Hercules who founded Tangier and made the Straits of Gibraltar with one blow from his sword.

   The caves were "discovered" in 1878, opened to the public in 1920, made a National Heritage site in 1952, had electric lights installed in 1982, were closed to the public after a rock fall caused by nearby construction work in December 2003 but were reopened in January 2004. The opening of the cave towards the sea is also quite bizarre because it resembles the shape of Africa. Well it does, but in reverse.

   

The Caves of Hercules

for my friends in the Black Rose Pothole Club

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   There are good tourist facilities above the caves and even a huge shop inside the cavern. The cave ends by opening up onto the Atlantic Ocean.

 

    Eventually we were heading for the mines in the High Atlas range looking for quality geological specimens, essentially the beautiful agate crystal geodes which were then fairly rare back in 1989 but after we introduced them to the market they have become easier to obtain these days.

   On route we stopped off at the Blue City of Chefchaouen, where whole streets and alleyways were whitewashed, or should I say blue washed, as was the custom, perhaps to deter flies, which it does, or simply as pure decoration.

 

 

   When we eventually reached the mines we found hundreds upon hundreds of agate geodes, the problem being, that when we broke them open the vast majority of them were plain grey 'orrible agate, of no use to man nor beast. Total and utter grot, as we say.   Maybe one in a hundred geodes had crystals in them, but when they did, they were magnificent and well worth the trouble. Sparkling crystal grottos with the added advantage of coming in two pieces which fitted together again perfectly to safeguard the fragile contents within. We eventually found enough quality geodes to make our trip worth while, business wise.

   And then a few unexpected treasures to make my day.

#      Fossicking around on the mine tips uncovered loads of black shiny Galena crystals and the occasional but very welcome and very heavy golden amber coloured Cerrusite Crystal. Both being forms of the mineral Lead, Galena is Lead Sulphide  and Cerrusite is Lead Carbonate. The common orange brown Barytes in its cocks-comb form was everywhere.

        A very small piece of banded brown material caught my eye which looked familiar, it was Calamine, a Zinc Carbonate which used to be mined at the  Calamine Caverns near Grassington in the Yorkshire Dales. The mine worker told me that a local stone carver had large slabs of it ... and, as I already had a stone vase made from English Calamine I was eager to see what the stone carver had to offer and I wasn't disappointed. A fabulously large and very heavy fruit plate, which I had to have, and hope we made the weight limit on the plane, but we needn't have bothered about it because although the excess was enough to sink the Titanic, the customs inspector just said, "Huh .. rocks, carry on", so we did, the straining porter got a big tip.

   Whilst at the stone carvers I noticed some fantastic looking geodes filled with shimmering galena crystals. Wow, I was impressed, until, I had a feeling this could not be right. The stone carver grinned at me, took an empty useless geode, filled it with glue and sprinkled it with broken up galena crystals. He had found a use for the useless geodes, and very nice too. I am betting it would fool all the tourists and even student geologists. Don't you just love it? The ingenuity of my fellow man never ceases to amaze.

#  I was well pleased with the finds but the best was yet to come. On our way back from the Atlas Mountains we stopped at a roadside stall selling fossils. Huge heaps of the most horrible grot one could ever hope to see with a single price for every piece regardless of size or type, £1 English .. well we were foreigners.   Hidden away under the heap was a piece that took my eye, and I couldn't believe it, a Neolithic polished stone axe ..c.3,500 - 4000 BC. I had been wanting one of these since I was a young lad and had heard about the stone axe factory at Langdale in the Lake District.

    "How much for this then?" I asked.

    "£1," he said, not budging on price.

I then went through the heap with a small tooth comb and found another axe, although much smaller than the first. "I'll take these two," I said, "£2, OK?"  After the done deal he said that all of his rocks came from within a few miles of his home.  The last time I saw polished stone axes like these were the ones that had come out of the burials at Naqada in Egypt but then again, the long dead owners of all these axes probably belonged to the same tribes that roamed the Sahara when it was a fertile grassland, and they were shoved to the edges of the encroaching desert, some east, some west.

     After this highlight the rest of the holiday was a bit mediocre the Snake Charmer, the Kasbah, seen one seen them all, the lack lustre meals, although prunes with everything was quite novel, the continued insults, and we were very glad to get back to Egypt the following week. Thank goodness that Jimmy is our man in Tangiers. They don't pay him enough, and I found what I was looking for ...because that's what I do, find things, especially gold, I like gold, it comes out of the ground all bright and shiny ... but that's another story.

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