Lets talk about your gazelle

Having already covered a considerable distance, we both realized about at the same moment the potentially insane setup of the situation: two European girls shoulder to shoulder and hip to hip with five big Moroccan men crammed inside a car that claims to be a taxi driving us to Imlil. We had even fought a few hard battles for the right to pay a fair enough price to get a place in each of the dubious vehicles that we had to take and that some random dude loitering nearby pointed us to. All of them might equally have been waiting for just such an opportunity to kidnap a bride for personal use or for exchanging on a camel fair.

A strong white woman, not locked up to anything and no apparent owner nearby, is not something you'd walk by on a street without at least trying to pick it up. It is an expensive trade article. "Très belle gazelle, plus que mille chameaux!" ["Very pretty gazelle, more than thousand camels!"] was a starting offer that a slightly indignant Alice got for me when she herself had already been sold by Jesus to an eager berber for mere 40 camels. In this country you will always get ripped off to the bones without an accountant in your mind, ready to jump head first into a haggling fest with a ready list of current prices. As luck would have it, Alice was once again saved by Fortuna when the men agreed on exchanging the gazelle and the camels later by post. Another point to learn from here - this is what it means to be an escort of a gazelle. In a country where everyone wants to sell you something, a gazelle is a rare valuable they would like to buy.