Two Lambs for a Handful of Blue
Red she could make from the root in the sack.
Blue had to be bought.
Two lambs went down the mountain in spring
and came back as a line through the red.
Red is the mountain's own colour, made from madder that grows wild on the slopes, but blue has to be bought. Indigo came up to the Khenifra market in hard cakes from the south, and it was dear, dearer than most families could justify for something to walk on. So the story of a blue line in a Beni M'Guild rug is always, somewhere behind it, the story of what was sold to pay for it. Two lambs, say, in the spring, driven down the track by a boy who did not want to let them go. Then the cake was ground and the pot was set, and she had blue enough for lines and signs through the red, drawn with a spare hand because every knot of it had cost something.
It is a big rug and a heavy one, eighteen kilos of wool, with the pile still a good finger and a half deep. It lives now in a sitting room with grey walls and a leather sofa, where the blue does what expensive things do and catches the eye first.
Handwoven rugs grow in beauty, memory, and value with every passing year.