The Red Room at the Top of the Pass
Last house before the col.
Travellers knock after dark and are let in.
The floor is red from wall to wall,
and nobody who slept on it forgot.
There is always a last house before a mountain pass, and in the Middle Atlas it is the house where travellers caught by the weather knock after dark and are given a place on the floor. A rug like this one is that floor. Three metres and more of deep red, two fingers thick, big enough for the whole guest room, tied by a woman who knew that the people sleeping on it would be cold and tired and far from home, and who put into the wool the thing a traveller most wants to see at the end of a hard day, which is the colour of a fire. The lattice runs through it in a darker line, steady as a pulse, and the red itself has the depth of madder that was given time in the pot.
Forty years of guests have given the pile the softness of something slept on gladly. It is a generous rug for a generous room. It lives now in a house with high ceilings and tall windows, in the room where the sofa is deep and the evenings are long, and it still makes people want to lie down on it.
Handwoven rugs grow in beauty, memory, and value with every passing year.