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subject.
    ‘I think it’s straight up this road,’ says Si. ‘They said you can’t miss it.’
    Twenty minutes later and we are so high up the side of amountain that the clouds are drifting across the track, making driving even more hazardous. Occasionally through the mist we spot tiny matchstick figures of men and women working the fields in the distance.
    ‘They’ll be phoning the farmers on their mobiles saying there are strangers around,’ says Si as casual as ever. ‘Nothing moves round these parts without everyone knowing about it.’
    As the mid-morning sun begins to burn away the cloud cover, the peaks of three snow-capped mountains come into full view ahead of us. We turn a sharp left around a mountain pass between two huge boulders and hundreds of feet high above us to the left is a tiny concrete shack. I can just make out the figure of a man sitting outside the building smoking.
    ‘That’s gotta be the place,’ says Si.
    ‘How do we get up there?’ I ask.
    ‘You walk, old son,’ said Si. ‘Nothing’s easy round these parts.’
    Just then the man up in the distance waves in our direction. It’s a relief to know he is even expecting us.
    Ten minutes later we’ve reached the shack after a twisting and turning hike up a steep rocky verge. It’s a strange feeling to know people must have been talking about your arrival before you’ve even got there.
    Then, as if he is reading my mind, Si explains: ‘The maximum we should stay here is a couple of hours before everyone knows we’re around. Then we might have a few problems.’
    ‘Why?’
    ‘Because every fucker within a hundred miles of here will want paying. That’s why.’
    ‘What happens if we don’t pay them?’
    ‘They nick our watches and our phones and our wallets, if we’re lucky.’
    The man we saw from below is smoking as we approach his building. He looks very young, maybe no more than about twenty or twenty-one. He seems friendly enough but then he has just finished smoking a big Kif spliff while awaiting our arrival. The red polka-dot neckerchief around his neck contrasts oddly with the tatty jeans, sweat-soaked T-shirt and flip-flops.
    Just then I catch a glimpse of a striking Moroccan woman of about the same age as the man and a small child, probably no more than two years old. They’re sitting outside the back area of the shack by a makeshift clothesline. The man seems irritated they’ve come into view and immediately shouts at them. They disappear inside.
    ‘For fuck’s sake don’t look at his wife. He’ll take it as an insult,’ explains Si, helpfully.
    The man turns and glances at us through narrow, suspicious, bright-blue eyes. He must be a Berber because he looks more European than Arab.
    Si engages the man in a proper conversation while I retreat to sit on a rock in front of the shack.
    Si eventually beckons to me to follow him and the man inside the shack. Si explains that we can watch him sievinga crop of cannabis buds. It’s only then I am formally introduced to the man, whose name is Hassan.
    Later, I discover that Hassan keeps a gun under the bed he shares with his wife, just in case his friends turn into his enemies.

CHAPTER 2

HASSAN
    The nondescript scrubland behind Hassan’s house is where bushels of cannabis, left to dry in the hot sun, are hanging from wooden frames. In this climate very little grows apart from cannabis and Hassan depends on this crop to support his family. Inside the shack, Si translates as Hassan explains the process of how the hashish is made as he places the cannabis buds on a giant sieve and covers it with a tarpaulin.
    Hassan then beats the tarpaulin with sticks rather like a drum. The pollen or resin crystals – which contain the drug’s main psychoactive ingredient THC – break from the plant and fall through the sieve. When the drumming is complete, Hassan gathers the pollen together, compressing it to form bricks of yellowy-brown hash.
    As Hassan prepares the hash, he