Alexander|High Atlas near Marrakech — an hour's drive to the Hindu Kush

Leave Marrakech on the Asni road and the change takes about forty minutes. The plain gives out, the red walls fall behind, and the land starts folding upward into bare rock and terraced villages the colour of the hillside they are cut into. Somewhere along this route, roughly an hour outside the city, Oliver Stone's crew built the Hindu Kush — the passes where Alexander's army grinds eastward through cold and thinning air toward India.

They built it and then they took it away. That is the honest state of this location. There is no standing set to photograph, no plaque, nothing to queue for. What survives is the reason the production came: a range that reads on camera as the far edge of the known world, close enough to a major airport that a unit could sleep in a hotel and shoot Bactria before lunch. Morocco has been selling exactly that convenience to film crews for sixty years.

Drive it yourself and you understand the casting. Above Asni the road climbs toward Imlil in tight switchbacks, walnut trees in the valley floor, mule tracks going up where the tarmac stops, and Toubkal — the highest peak in North Africa — closing the head of the valley in snow for much of the year. Berber villages hold to the slopes with no visible margin for error. Grand taxis run from Marrakech most mornings; the trailhead at Imlil is where walkers start.

Stand on the pass with the wind coming down off the snow and the film's premise stops feeling like costume drama. An army did once walk into country like this, and most of it did not want to.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons.