Every August, a hundred and twenty hectares of Atlantic coastline south of El Jadida fill up for the moussem of Moulay Abdellah Amghar. More than seventeen hundred horsemen come from tribes across the country. The crowd is counted in millions. At the centre of the ground is tbourida: a line of riders at full gallop, firing in a single sound, then reining in as one.

At the edge of the same ground there is a wooden cylinder about eight metres across, held together by bolts and paint. Men ride motorcycles horizontally around the inside of it, kept off the floor by nothing but their own speed. The audience stands on a gallery at the rim and looks straight down into the barrel at the tops of their heads.

The two things are the same thing, four hundred years apart and separated by two hundred metres of fairground. One has royal patronage, television, and a lineage. The other has a generator, a ticket window, and a man in sandals who has done this all his life and will do it again in forty minutes.

I photographed the barrel, and the faces looking down into it.