Toubkal is the highest mountain in North Africa, a bare pyramid of red rock reaching 4,167 metres in the Moroccan High Atlas, a couple of hours from Marrakech. From spring to autumn you can walk to the top of it without a rope. The rock is the reason it looks the way it does. Most of the range is pale sedimentary stone, but Toubkal itself is far older volcanic rock, worn into steep crests and long slopes of scree, so the summit ridge feels alpine among rounded mountains. You walk in on a mule track from the village of Imlil, climbing the Mizane valley through the hamlet of Aroumd and its terraced walnut groves as the walls close and the air thins. Partway up stands a white-painted boulder. This is Sidi Chamharouch, a shrine to the figure Berber tradition calls the king of the jinn, older than Islam in these mountains, and people have been coming to it for cures for generations.
Above the shrine the valley steepens to the Refuge du Toubkal, a stone building at 3,207 metres under bare slopes above a meadow where the mules graze. It is loud with trekkers at dinner and then silent and cold, because you leave for the summit before first light. A few hours of switchbacks up loose scree end at a metal pyramid on the top, with ranges folding away south toward the Sahara and, on a clear morning, cloud lying in the valleys below your boots. From about November to April that same corridor holds snow and ice, and the walk-up becomes a mountaineering day with crampons and an axe. South of the summit the ground drops steeply to Lac d'Ifni, a glacial lake near 2,295 metres ringed by bare rock and a few Berber hamlets, far quieter than the refuge route. The two journeys on this track part at the white boulder. Pilgrims cross the stream to the rock itself; everyone else is asked not to, and keeps climbing toward the top of North Africa.