Marnia-Oujda, North Africa

Besides this "trip", my father went at least four more times to North Africa later in his life -- not being all that adventurous (or perhaps it was my mother who wasn't), he didn't ever return to Algeria, but he and my mother went at least twice of Morocco, once to Libya (before Quadafi), and at least once to Egypt. Each of those trips has its own story -- my aged aunt who had polio as a child riding a donkey through the souk; dinner under the stars on the desert outside of Cairo and visits to the Temple of Dendur before it departed for New York; our plane being forced down by a sand storm between Libya and Egype. But none of those stories matches those of The Shower of Frogs.

A Shower of Frogs --- Chapter 3

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Marnia-Oujda

Whoever selected our campsite at Marnia in Algeria was well acquainted with Hell. He undoubtedly had been there and was determined to share his hateful experience with others. Gustave Dore, were he among us, would have been reinspired to illustrate Dante's Inferno.
Our campsite has been described as fla desolate, sterile, rocky, dusty, heat-scarred valley." Camp Marnia was an Arab goat pasture--a small valley that all day gathered in the sun's rays and kept out the cool breezes. For centuries, goats/ sheep, and camels, eating close to the land, had nibbled away all the green foliage and reduced the treeless land to sand, rocks, and scrubby grass. By now only goats found it habitable. Goats and my outfit, the 325th Glider Infantry. At Marnia, Algeria, and later in Kairouan, Tunisia/ there was established from absolute zero a bustling army camp.

As part of an advance party I left Casablanca and drove a jeep northward along the Atlantic coast to Rabat. Even from a distance we made out, against the blue sky, the peculiar thirteenth-century minaret, its tall, slender silhouette sharp and graceful in the gleaming morning sun. At Rabat a great sultan had once preached a holy war against Saint Louis. But Louis IX soon died of dysentery at Carthage, a ruined city in distant Tunisia. At Rabat we turned right and drove thirty-six miles to Meknes, where once 60,000 Christians were worked as slaves. Thirty miles farther east we circled Fez, religious/ scholastic/ and literary center of Muslim Africa. Here troglodyte women-femmes d' occasion (women at a bargain)-lived in caves outside the city walls and bellowed for masculine trade. We drove on to Taza. After driving over gently rolling country, we came to the Rif Mountains. Near Oujda/ an embroidery center/ we approached the southern slopes of the Atlas Mountains.

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