On the First Tuesday of Every Month, Mules Carry Thirty Crates of Books Up the Mountain

Deep in the Atlas Mountains lies a village called Tamgout, more than two thousand meters up, unreachable by car — everything that enters comes in on a mule's back. On the first Tuesday of every month, the children at the edge of the village prick up their ears: two mules come clattering up the gravel track, carrying not flour, not gas canisters, but books.

Behind the mules walks Amina, twenty-five, one of the few girls in these mountains to finish high school, now the librarian of the Mule-Back Library.

The library has no walls. It consists of a small book station in the town below, two mules, thirty wooden crates, and seven mountain villages. Once a month Amina hauls the books up and stops at each village: two days in Tamgout, three in Imki, higher up. The mules are named Postman and Professor. Professor has a mild temper and every child wants to ride him; Postman knows the paths so well that in fog no one needs to lead him.

Amina remembers the library's first ascent. It was the year she finished middle school. An aid organization had set up a circulating book station in the town below, but no one would carry books into the mountains — the trails were dangerous and freight was dear. Amina volunteered: "I have mules. I know every mountain path. And I know how to cover books in kraft paper." The staff looked at the girl standing in the doorway of their office, schoolbag on her back, refusing to leave, and said yes.

The first trip was thirty crates and six hours of walking. At one rockfall she lashed the crates to her own back, sent the mules across unloaded, and crawled through on hands and knees. She reached Tamgout after dark, but the whole village's children were sitting at the door of the meeting house, waiting — they had never seen so many books at once.

She has walked that route for four years now.

The books receive mountain-grade treatment: three layers of plastic sheeting before every trip, held overhead at every river crossing. Worn-out covers are rebound in kraft paper painted with little mountains and mules. Amina remembers what each child's next book should be. She saved a picture atlas of the stars for Youssouf the shepherd, who studies the sky at night; she swapped in a thicker book of poems for laughing Fatima, who had copied the last one out by hand. Her register records more than loans and returns. It records names and a column called "where they went" — she wants to see how far a book can carry a person.

The hardest question came from twelve-year-old Laila, who asked, "What does outside the mountains look like?"

Amina didn't describe it. She handed Laila a book about the ocean. "Look," she said. "This page has no edge. Our mountains end where your eyes stop. The sea doesn't."

Laila read that book at least twenty times and returned it with the corners curled from her handling. Three years later she became the village's first girl to go on to secondary school, in Marrakech. On the day she left, that book was in her luggage — a gift from Amina, its kraft cover painted with mountains, and at the foot of the mountains a mule with a small crate on its back.

The "where they went" column is filling in: two university students now, three in vocational school, a young man who taught himself to install solar panels, and Laila. Visitors ask how many books the library holds. "Eight hundred or so, in circulation," Amina says. "But I prefer to count by destinations. Twelve so far."

The mules are not carrying books. They are carrying the other side of the mountains. A book is the only thing in these villages that reaches faraway places without anyone building a road.

Last winter the snow was heavy and the pass closed for a month. The day it reopened, Postman and Professor had barely come into view before the children of Tamgout came running. A first-grader shouted on tiptoe, "The Professor is coming!" — the voice of a festival. Amina opened the first crate and handed the books out, one by one, into small red-cold hands. One little girl sat down in the snow and opened hers on the spot, and nothing could persuade her to get up.

In that moment Amina remembered her own high school years. If nobody had hauled books up the mountain, her life would have been the life most common here: sheep, marriage, a cooking fire. She doesn't think that life is a bad one. She just wants the children to know that other possibilities exist, packed in those thirty crates, coming up the mountain once a month.