So I had thrown my spare energies into writing. I had written stories ever since school, where I had terrified friends with tales of graveyard ghosts and wicked smugglers.

My mother, too, was a teller of tales and probably in large part responsible for my wild imagination (indeed, she accepted the news that I had fallen in love with a Berber tribesman with remarkable equanimity and not a little glee).

She told me a Cornish ancestor had been stolen by pirates. After some research I discovered more than a kernel of truth to this unlikely tale.
Moroccan corsairs — Barbary pirates — had carried off 60 men, women and children from a church in Mount’s Bay in Cornwall in 1625, and sold them as slaves in North Africa.

Among those captives may well have been our lost family member, no doubt destined for some rich man or sultan’s harem. It was perfect material for a novel.

So that’s why I went to Morocco, to find out more. My friend Bruce came too, bribed by the offer of us doing some climbing together in the Anti-Atlas Mountains.

We spent two weeks in Rabat and Salé, traipsing around museums and historical sites, talking to academics. I took hundreds of photos and pages of notes, casting my characters as I went.

We ended up in the remote mountain village of Tafraout, 800 miles south-west, on a whim: I had found a climbing guidebook whose cover showed a route up a rose-red cliff towering above a misty valley. It called to us both.

But fate conspired against us climbing the Lion’s Head — 13 hours after setting off on what should have been a six-hour climb, we found ourselves forced to spend the night on the mountain, with February snow on the tops, shivering in the freezing air in T-shirts and jeans, 1,500ft above the lights of the tiny village.

Unseasonal rain had created an unexpected obstacle course of waterfalls and mudslides, making the crux of the route impassable.

As I shivered on a ledge, I reflected on my life and vowed that, if I survived, I was going to become a serious novelist; and I was going to get to know the fascinating man I had met the night before.