The mystery of a great bearded serpent

The great bearded serpent

It's an interesting case to tell you here that to this day I still want to study up close when I get the chance and time.. I'm from Morocco (A country in North Africa) and this little anecdote is about a creature whose descriptions baffled me in every sense that I simply dismissed as senile geezer talk or rumours being passed around around campfires but still, with me being as naturally intrigued as I am I didn't wanna condone it that easily, the story goes like this..
About seven or eight years ago when I was at our remote "grand" family house in our secluded village where all my family used to gather to rejoice, have fun and just overall let loose from the stresses of the city, one morning I was about to go out for a stroll headed for a small dry canyon near there that I loved to hang around and meditate, to give you a bit of context, that canyon was already filled with all sort of oddities that I kept stumbling upon whenever I was there which was part of why I loved it anyway, the other part was simply the absolute sweet feel of the lonesome quiet of the wild, tis a deserty place with wheat fields as far as the eye can stretch, yet soothingly eerie and mysterious it often made me feel, once I was there at around sunset when suddenly I got a gut wrenching feeling that I had to look to my left far enough and I spotted three wolves sniffing around a carcass which fled after a few seconds of staring contest, I immediately headed back home and remained cautious after that. If it's high noon with the scorching yellow desert sun above and you're standing down on the canyon's rocky bed? You look to each sides of its bays and you see all sorts of deathly creatures lurking, some stuck on the walls and others lower on the ground fighting for survival I kid you not, countless strange caverns and crevices spread here and there, all sorts of reptiles and scorpions and giant spiders you see just being still, wherever you set foot you hear the crunch of yet another discarded snake skin and withered bones. Once I found a checkered cub of some sort that I wanted to catch and make a pet out of which quickly got into one of the little tunnels that discouraged me just by the looks of it, another time I found a dead striped hyena and the wound didn't look like a human made it at all cos' if it was its head would have been missing as belief in witchcraft here in Morocco is dominant and hyenas' brains are sold for high sums of money, and here we don't have mega predators or big fauna that would have harmed let alone killed that hyena so yes.. But let's put all this aside for now, many more incidents I could have told you but the heart of my topic is this, going backwards for when I was about to go out that morning, my grandfather and some of my great uncles and local tribesmen whom have been living there for literal centuries by the way, said where are you going and someone answered in my stead he's going to "the valley" and they all mumbled "beware of so and so" and I said what? My grand father _may he rest in peace_ said something about a great serpent, up til here it was nothing unusual, I figured it was some sort of large viper or boa til he said it had a beard and hair all over, now my strong minded grandfather as well as the other men being born and bred there in the harshness of that region wouldn't have warned me of the matter if it was talk of a regular snake as those often came into the house when were just sitting about for they were nothing out of the ordinary for the folk there at all it's like seeing a fly buzz around for someone in the city, and he also was well aware of far greater dangers that would have befell me going down there than some slithering reptile, like wolves and wild dogs for example that often preyed on people traveling long distances in the fields on foot, also hyenas, boars, even bandits. l.. But why did those people refer to this creature whatever it may be before addressing everything else I mentioned above? What could it have been? I explained it as simply being some sort of a monitor or some lesser lizards with spikes around their heads but I did some research and those mostly don't live here, and I know that some bedouin people often refer to all reptiles as "snake" but this was not the case, my grandfather was a strong minded man that didn't twist words or joke around, he clearly said that it was a great bearded / hairy serpent (meters long) with a long tongue and it hissed with a loud noise like a high pitched screech, often attacksled people around the area there when they were working around the fields cutting hay or else things when we know that snakes don't actively go for humans except anacondas and large serpents and those don't inhabit Morocco. It could be many things... From mere village boogeyman folklore tales, to being supernatural even if you believe in such a thing, a creature that manifest for the lonesome vagabond, could be the sizzling heat of the sun causing mass hysteria for these toiling nomads, could be a misindentified regular wild animal or an undiscovered one whose population has dwindled into these far away places that no one curious enough trespasses... In any case it's definitely worth a thorough investigation which I will do undoubtedly soon enough, until then, let your imagination run wild as well as mine..