From Amman

Aqaba is calm and modern and comfortable. There are lawned roundabouts, working banks, smiling Jordanians with bright blue eyes. The town’s white blocks are scattered thickly across the steep brown hills that curve around the blue bay. A giant red, green and white Jordanian flag tugs heavily at the lines of its pole, unfurling grandly across the sky. On the waterfront beneath, men laze around in swim shorts, smoking, and women in head scarves and ankle length black tobes bathe timidly in rubber rings, floating in the shallows.

　

In the morning I climb from the coast, into the wind, towards gleaming brown hills. The air rushes towards the sea, strengthening as it is funneled between two great walls of dark rock that overhang the road, and I push helplessly against it. For hours I am in the shadows of the shear granite embankments, the pedals faltering beneath my feet. The wheels turn more easily as the great masses of rock fall away into plains of light red dust. Here, the only remnants of the mountains are irregular outcrops, protruding from the sands like smashed teeth, visible for miles across the flats.

　

There is a camel galloping by the road, kicking up plumes of blood-orange dust as its heavy hooves pound the sands. The cameleer, in a frayed shemagh and flowing grey robes, waves from the saddle, and yells for me to speed up. I draw level and we begin to race. The camel tears forward, and the telephone wires and the ochre rocks and the grains of Jupiter sands, die away behind us. The camel’s strides start to shorten, its rider starts to smile and I leave them panting in the heat.

　

I ride on, past intermittent plain villages of low stone houses, and sprawling complexes of corrugated warehouses, full of containers and waiting trucks, towards higher land, up into sandstone hills, under the midday sun. The road climbs out from the plains, and the desert below becomes empty and vast; the little villages are swallowed up in the sands; the road behind narrows to a thread; the rocky outcrops fade like freckles on a retreating face, until, from the top, all I can see is a blank wilderness below.

　

I have no water and I stop at a police post to fill up the bottles. Three men sit in armchairs watching an Egyptian movie. They pull up a chair and give me tea, and when I get up to go, they pretend to arrest me until I have another glass. The King’s Highway branches from the main road here, rolling over dusty uplands, towards Petra. The hills are dry and sparsely vegetated; the only inhabitants Bedouin herdsmen. I see their camps from the road; long tents of heavy, hemp-like cloth sitting in the hollows, a beaten-up Mitsubishi buggy outside, and on the slopes around, men in red and white shemaghs shepherding their goats. As I near Petra the shallow hills condense into dark mounds of bare rock, shedding the scree and scrub that covered the land a little to the south. The sun is dropping from the rose horizon and I ride through a quiet little village, down a steep hill, to Wasi Musa, and the edge of the rock-hewn city.

　

I spend two days in Petra, amongst the palaces and monastery and tombs of the old Nabataean city. Rough cliffs of deep orange rock have been smoothed and Romanesque columns, stepped sills, winged statues, and terraces decorated with swirling patterns, have been sculpted into the facades; whole cliff faces carved as if they were blocks of wood.

The road gently rises and falls as I ride north to Dana. The village sits on the precipice to a deep sandstone gorge, strewn with pale boulders and thin pine-leafed trees. Many of the houses here are crumbling; their old stone walls collapsing onto the narrow cobbled alleys that wind up the little piece of hillside. I camp on the roof of a small hotel and when I wake the gorge below is filled with cloud. I continue north to Karak, descending into, and rising from, Wadi Hasa, a vast sand-walled canyon. Deep triangular creases are imprinted across the sandstone sides, casting thin veins of shadow, which splinter like tributaries on a map, across the valley walls. There are olive trees growing in the rocky soil between Bedouin encampments at its base. I climb for ten kilometres to where the land plateaus to the north, and reach the towering limestone walls of Karak’s citadel late in the afternoon.

Along the desert highway to Amman the land is more subdued. The tarmac is flat and straight; the only forms on the horizon smoking factories and stale roadside towns. The city is set on a cluster of hills; its slopes filled with wealthy villas; its steep roads thick with traffic.

From Aqaba

I pedal up a barricaded overpass, above another busy highway, cars roaring beneath and alongside. Cairo gradually recedes behind me; the light blue skies, streaked white with wisps of cloud, reclaim the horizon, as the towers of bricks and glass lower, and then disappear altogether; the traffic thins, and the road stretches out towards fields of coarse yellow sands. I ride 140km across the desert flats, trucks flowing past, the land dry and empty. I reach Suez and sit by the canal and watch colossal tankers passing by, stacked high with colourful containers, which look no bigger than blocks of Lego on the huge decks.

I take a tunnel under the canal and ride south; the blue waters of the Red Sea to the east, desert plains to the west. There are patches of heavily watered crops; isolated squares of green amidst the still dust. By the water, tall charcoal-tipped chimneys rise from oil refineries, exhaling continuous orange flames and sending waves of black vapour into the sky. Further south the coast is full of high-rise resorts, each protected by tall steel gates, each marked by a wide billboard, showing smiling families in western swimsuits, enjoying the beach. The road is quiet and the wind blows behind me, propelling the bicycle effortlessly south.

The resorts die away and the road hugs the shore; a thin beach separates the tar from the water, and to the west coarser sands roll out to meet banks of rough rock. The sun is beginning to set, the sky beginning to glow a deep yellow, and the contours of the thick-grained desert beginning to sharpen. An old motor-bike chugs slowly past me, a family crammed onto the narrow frame. A few miles on I pass the bike standing isolated on the empty shore, and the mother, her headscarf quivering in the breeze, and then her children turn to watch and wave as I ride by.

The road leaves the sea and winds inland through sandy hills. There are smooth dunes of fine beige sands, peppered with black rocks, and worn banks of sandstone further from the road. Shallow channels run between the dunes, carved out by long-ago rains. I wheel my bike up the dry bed, over grey rocks and pale green scrub, and pitch my tent beneath a lone thorn tree by the bank of the wadi.

I wake while the sun is pale and crimson, and the grey light all around seems to come from elsewhere. I ride east, away from the coast, and dark mountains begin to rise from the sands, low and shallow at first; gentle slopes of brown scree falling into the dust, then darkening and towering above the road, blocking the morning sun, until all around I see nothing but rock. I reach the outskirts of a village; there are date palms and crumbling outhouses, and herds of goats grazing on thorn trees that grow in the crescents of sand beneath the rocks. Further on, there are walled gardens and low houses in courtyards, cluttered in the narrow flats between the mountains and the road. Children run towards the bicycle, pointing and shouting, and I feel like I’m in Africa again. The voices die down and the palms disappear and I turn off the road, and roll out my mat, and fall asleep.

I haven’t been up long and I see another cyclist pedaling towards me. We stop and sit on the roadside and talk about the journeys. He has come from England and is riding around the world; the length of Africa before him, then Asia, Australia, the Americas. He says he will be away for five years. I tell what I can about the roads south, and he about the roads east. I have only two months to reach Istanbul, and I realise the journey is near its end. We ride our separate ways and a little later I reach St. Katherine’s Monastery.

It is strange to ride among the quiet desert mountains, pedaling slowly against the oncoming wind, and to come to a village in their centre, and to see hundreds of tourists. All around there are big groups of South Koreans, Russians, French, English, some in matching luminous t-shirts, others having their visit filmed. We file along the high monastery walls, the slopes of Mt Sinai above, past the old stone well, beneath the pale, rose-brick bell-tower, and into the chapel, amidst all the dangling lanterns, and bronze urns, and chandeliers.

Within a few miles I am back alone among the silent brown mountains, climbing for the first time since Ethiopia, and then freewheeling, for mile after mile, hurtling towards Sinai’s eastern shores. I reach Nuweiba, and ride to the port, and soon I am on the boat, bound for Jordan.



Have a look at Steve’s blog, which is brilliant, at: http://www.cyclingthe6.blogspot.com

From Cairo

From Minya there are only 250km to reach Cairo. Today I head for Beni Suef; another set of high-rise blocks on the banks of the Nile. The road continues along the fringes of an irrigation canal, whose waters become lower and blacker and more cluttered with rubbish as I head north. Steep embankments drop towards the water on either side of the canal; they are covered in rotting fruit, polystyrene packaging, chicken carcases, soiled tissues, scraps of plastic bags, torn apart by hungry cats. I watch women and children walk down to the bank and wash metal plates and pots in the water. There are tall white tower blocks just behind the water-logged fields; water-buffalo graze and tall white birds with thin yellow legs stand still as statues in the thin wet grasses. The road is flat and I reach Beni Suef early in the day and drink glasses of tea and write until evening.

Soon I will be in Cairo; I ride fast and the traffic thickens. There are more bridges, more concrete blocks, more long posters of the president, looking out over the highway, jaw clenched beneath dark glasses, the red and black bands of the Egyptian flag behind. In every direction I can see the lone turrets of power stations, rising high above the date palms, sending dark smoke, from blackened tips, into the hot sky.

The cars are rushing in a constant stream now, jerking and honking, six lanes wide, flowing madly towards the towers collecting on the approaching skyline. I drift alongside, through Giza's decaying tower blocks, across the Nile, up the Corniche, and on, to Midan Tahir.

Since leaving Addis Ababa, expiring visas, departing ferries, police escorts, have kept me chasing the road north. That road is now at an end and I have time in Cairo. I go the city’s eastern quarters first; to all the mosques. The streets are narrow here and many floored with dust. Slanted scaffolds of dark wood cross the air between the old stone buildings that enclose the cluttered alley. In the gaps between the latticed beams I can see fluted minarets; pairs of tall stone shoots rising to a chalky sky, encircled by crown shaped balconies that open like petals around the spherical towers. On the street, old women swat flies from trays of silver fish and men in beige jalibiyas sit hunched on low stools behind mounds of pale yellow pears. There are pigeons and chickens and rabbits crammed into a layered wire-fenced coup, and on the corner behind, a short man, with an enormous metal gourd strapped to his chest, stands, like a French cartoon, pouring black coffee into little glasses. The bread boys fly past on bicycles, shouting to clear a path, one hand, dusted white with flour, resting on the handlebars, the other supporting a five-foot long tray piled high with flat buns.

I knock on a thick bronze-studded door, beneath a huge, smooth-brick mosque. A few minutes later a dosey imam lets me in. Small circular grooves, decorated with brown stars, are carved into the chamber of the portico roof, leaving triangular splinters of stone hanging like stunted stalactites above the high door. Within, long lines of Arabic script run along the wooden panelling just below the ceiling, and the walls are covered in white and turquoise alabaster murals. From the roof, I can see abandoned planks and tyres and bundles of tangled wire, left on the tops of buildings just below. There are tall glass and steel towers far to the south, and all around, crescent-tipped spires sprout above the tattered city skyline.

When I come out, a man in a white skull cap, with a thick black beard, walks towards me: ' My brother, take this. For clothes, for food.' He hands me a two hundred pound note. I am astonished. 'You are a Muslim, my brother?' I tell him no, that I just have a beard, that my clothes are worn from a long journey, that I have plenty to eat. He smiles and tells me he is a shoe-maker, and takes me to his shop and gives me a glass of tea.

I walk up past the citadel, along a busy ring-road, to a cemetery in the far east of the city. Long lanes of fine dust split rows of stone walls that guard domed-minarets. Behind the metal gates of many of the tombs I hear mothers shouting at noisy children, men spitting, the clatter of dishes being washed. Throughout the cemetery people are living in the tomb enclosures.

I spend four days in the city: In the white-washed churches of Coptic Cairo, the coach-ridden pyramids, the tranquil suburbs of Maadi, in smart nightclubs, full of high-heels, frosted glasses of Russian vodka, brightly painted eyelids. Tomorrow I ride east to Sinai.

From El Minya

North to Qena, to Sohag, to Asyut, to Minya. I try to dart between the red and black police fences that block the road, but I am seen, and a large man in a white uniform stands in front and points for me to pull over. I wait for an hour and am told a car is here to escort me. A blue van with six officers inside pulls up and I am told to go. I ride on and the blue van crawls a few metres behind.

The view from the road is much as before. Pink flowers sprout from overgrown Nile Roses on the banks of the canal that flanks the road. Thick jets of foaming water gush from generator-powered pumps, down narrow channels, to turn the desert green. In the fields men in jalibiyas and turbans sift through the soil on hands and knees, planting seeds. The blue van hums behind me. Boys swimming in the canal yell out as I pass and splash the water with their hands. Men sit awkwardly on reluctant donkeys, trotting between the fields, and further off, a train hoots and groans along the old tracks. The blue van draws level as I take the flyover into Qena and hums slowly behind until I find a hotel.

The sun is strong when I walk into the temple grounds just outside town. Amidst the date palms there are fallen statues and collapsed sandstone colonnades, and ahead, six tall stone pillars, each with a pharaoh's head at its centre, support the broad temple entrance. In the shadows within, an old man, with grey stuble and a white turban, sweeps the stone slabs between the rows of glossed columns. There are long tunnels of grey stone, bathed in harsh fluorescent light, engraved with funerary boats, sun gods, jackal heads. I climb onto the roof and look down at the ruins, and clamber down into dark chambers beneath the temple floor.

I leave Qena and at the checkpoint a blue van is waiting. I ride north, 150 km, to Sohag, along the canal, past lines of adobe houses, many decorated with paintings of mosques and boats and stars, strewn amongst the fields and up the desert ridge behind. Beneath the palms, men dangle fishing lines into the water, and fat, smooth-haired water buffalo chomp on huge piles of maize stalks. It is beautiful when the road rejoins the Nile; there are slender canoes floating near the bank, and palms reflected in the still water, and sand mountains to the east, full of caves and dark doorways carved high into the rock. I want to stop and take a photograph and sit by the river for a moment, but the blue van is just behind me and I don't stop. The sun is scorching and my mouth is dry and my legs feel heavy. I stand on the pedals and speed off, trying to outrun the escort, absurdly.

The blue van stops for petrol and I think about turning into a field and hiding and riding on alone. I imagine the conversation between Mahmoud, the general at the last post, and the officers in the van: 'You lost him! Six of you, in a van. One white man, on a bicycle! How? You imbeciles!' Mahmoud is fat and smokes Rothmans and probably would have slapped one of them and huffed and puffed into his walkie-talkie. It makes me smile, but I stay on the road and soon the blue van is humming behind, just as before, and I pedal on.

It is mid-afternoon when I join the flyover into the city. I stare out at crowded tar roads criss-crossing through rows of scruffy concrete towers, ten stories high, with steel stumps protruding towards the sky; foundations of another floor that was never built. I am stopped at a checkpoint and told to follow another van to a hotel. It is hot and I am tired as I dodge scooters and honking taxis, and kids running up and asking my name, while I try to tail the police. When I go out for food later, a man in a shirt and jeans, with a revolver tucked into his belt, follows me and sits on the table behind, smoking shisha. He leaves as I leave and watches me climb the stairs to the little hotel.

I take two days to ride the 250 km to Minya, sleeping in Asyut between. I am chaperoned all the way and the constant police presence engulfs my mind, the riding, the land around me. A busy stream of dwellings boards the road and sometimes I hear a train crashing past. For long stretches I stare at the tar just above the handlebars and try to blank out the humming van behind. In towns, tuc-tucs swarm along the road, blasting their horns, and tall camels, so overloaded with maize they are only identifiable by their soft padded-feet, plod calmly through the traffic.

On the outskirts of Minya I take a little bridge over the canal and turn off into a dusty street full of carts and bicycles and rusty old Egyptian cars. The blue van blasts its horn and I rattle over the bumpy stones, out of sight. I ride on through the little stone streets, up narrow alleys, past fruit stands and a thousand flies, and blacksmiths hammering sheets of metal, and dark butchers shops, filled with thick legs of raw meat, hanging, wrapped in cloth that is turning pink from the flesh within. A man on an old bicycle asks where I go and leads me to the centre. He is old and has a huge bag of grapes dangling heavily from the handlebars. Each time he hits a bump or a hole or swerves to avoid a scooter or a football, I think he will topple over, but he stays upright, and soon we are on a wide tarmac boulevard, overshadowed by a line of tall buildings, in the city centre.

From Luxor

There is a long blast from the foghorn, we all stir, and the worn white ferry pulls off the concrete jetty and turns north up Lake Nasser. It is a little before sunset and a crowd of men have come up on deck to pray. The ship gently sways and sixty white robes kneel and rise and tilt their heads back and forth, their backs to the setting sun. Night falls and I lie out on deck looking at the sky. We pass a great temple on the western bank. I think we must be in Egypt now; bathed in soft yellow light there are four colossal statues, sitting on stone thrones, guarding the entrance to a temple, carved into the rock. One has lost its head; the others have slit eyes, closed beneath pharaonic manes. The spotlights flood the smooth temple façade in warm light and beams are caught in the narrow groves of hieroglyphics that have been etched into the rockface. Abruptly the lights are switched off and the temple and its stone pharaohs disappear into the shadows.

It is chaos when we arrive. A monstrous old Egyptian policeman blocks the metal doors to shore; brutish arms outstretched across the gates like thick rope. Porters in torn blue overalls and grimy white turbans barge through the crowded metal tunnel, ferrying huge plastic sacks and TV boxes and metal crates. Fat women in burkhas fall to the ground, we are all sweating. Police pour onto the boat, everyone is shouting and shoving, cramped in the low steel alleyway. The doors open and we flood onto the jetty like taunted bulls suddenly released.

From the port the road weaves between pale desert hills. There are concrete barricades lining the tar, and empty century posts linked by ribbons of barbed wire, as if the sandstone wilderness were a prison. Tall wasted apartment blocks line Aswan’s outer hills; layer upon layer of box balconies beneath a clutter of decaying satellite dishes, rising to a clear blue sky. I reach the river, and ride slowly up the palm-lined bank. There are huge cruise ships docked beside the promenade. I can see glittering chandeliers and flat-screen TVs and golden staircases spiraling between the decks. Behind, white-sailed feluccas glide upstream like cotton kites.

I linger in Aswan: the cool conditioned air inside, the lines of shinning street lamps, the bus-loads of white faces, the fridges full of branded drinks on every corner, the carefully manicured alleyways of its pristine souk, filled with neat sacks of colourful spices. I realize I left Africa behind in the sands of Sudan. It makes me sad.

From Aswan the road runs north between the Nile and the railway. Narrow plots of maize and sorghum are crammed into the thin plains beside the river, and across the tracks to the east, houses of all colours are huddled together on the steep banks of a dry sandstone ridge. Streams of sotty yellow carriages trundle past on the rails, men hanging from the open windows, faint veils of black smog trailing in its wake. I overtake donkeys, lugging brightly decorated wooden carts, piled high with bundles of wilted maize stalks or gas canisters. Smartly uniformed children make their way back from school. The girls wear white veils and blue dresses, the boys are in neat shirts and shorts. Many are fat; all have black buckled shoes and shinny new backpacks.

I reach Idfu near midday and stop to see the temple here. In a high enclosure on the edge of town there are two huge smooth-walled stone monuments, joined by a rectangular archway. A pair of granite falcons stands either side of the entrance, and behind, through the dimly lit interior, lines of beautifully engraved alabaster colonnades, showing gods with the heads of birds and foxes and crocodiles, recede towards crumbling statues beyond.

Big white coaches, with ‘Luxury Tours’ written in gold letters on their sides, zoom past as I ride north to Luxor. Dark grey curtains are drawn shut behind the windows. Every five kilometers, black and red fences have been pulled into the road, funneling the traffic into a single lane. Policemen sit smoking in the shade, and I try to stay on the blind side of cars as we bounce over the bumps, to avoid another passport check. The road leaves the river and passes steep sandstone hills that catch the sun’s rays, sending waves of heat radiating towards the road. There are dark rectangular doorways cut into the rock, and no signs of life on the ridge. I rejoin the Nile and the land is green again and full of people and I watch bright red tractors churning up the fields.

As I approach Luxor the streams of tour buses thicken and in town there are white faces everywhere. Some are dressed like Arabs in jalibiyas. Long rows of cruise ships are moored along the riverbank, joining into a thick band of gleaming white that sparkles like a brand new shopping mall, floating on the Nile. On my left there is a wide dusty trench dug between the roads. I look down, and between the racing-black-bus-tyres and the slow-moving wooden cartwheels, I follow a line of sandstone sphinxes that leads to a grey obelisk in front of two towering temple gates. Amidst green palms, two stone pharaohs stand beneath the gates, and behind, like a limpet, a smooth domed mosque sits amongst the ancient piles of crumbling stones and colonnades.

From Wadi Halfa

Before dawn I am riding again, between the imposing steel pillars of a shiny new bridge, over to the east bank. The road leaves the river and soon I am flanked by two vast expanses of mustard dust. I stop and sit on the pebbled verge off the road and eat some biscuits and watch a green lorry trundle past. It turns into the desert and dumps a boot-load of rubbish into the sand. Bottles and plastic bags and torn wrappers cartwheel across the dust, spinning and tumbling towards me in the breeze.

I ride into the wind, heat streaming from the blazing sun. I am hot and I see a cafeteria ahead and pull off the road. Beneath the shade of tarpaulins men smoke on bubbling shishas and I fill my bottles from cool stone urns with water the colour of milky tea, thick with Nile silt. Outside a generator whirs loudly and a battered green LandRover stands on flattened black tyres. I lie on a rope bed and my mum calls from home and wishes me a happy birthday. We talk for a long time, while all around men are washing their feet and beginning to pray. An old man edges his way into the shade, pressing his gold-leafed cane carefully into the sand with each step. His eyes twinkle like bright butterflies beneath his white turban and he comes over and shakes my hand. 'My dear, you are welcome in Sudan. Do you have something cold to drink? This is your bicycle. This is very good.' He tells me I must rest until the sun is lower and to be careful for hyenas: 'You will see their eyes in the dark from the road.'

The wind drops later in the day and I ride fast through the rocky desert plains. There are granite boulders strewn across the sand and mounds of purple scree sloping into the dust. I follow the road through the dusty hills and rejoin the palm-lined river. The sun begins to set, reducing the low western hills and the scruffy palms to dark silhouettes and painting the horizon, just above, deep yellow. I turn off the road and fetch water from the river and camp beside a crumbling wall.

From here the road follows the river, passing neat clusters of smooth-walled dwellings. I stop at a police check-point near midday and drink cool water and eat dates in the shade. Near sundown I reach Ferqa, a village on the river, and a young guy invites me to stay with his family. He gives me goat stew and begs me to take him to Ingliterra. A little later there is a great commotion and his mother rushes into the courtyard, flustered. Saleed tells me a man has been eaten by a crocodile. It has bitten off his leg. All the village has gone to the bank to help. He says the other men beat the crocodile away, but the hospital is far.

Next morning, while it is still dark I get lost in the deep banks of sand between the village and the road. I wander through the rocky dunes for almost an hour and only find the tar as day begins to break. I ride all day to make Wadi Halfa by night fall. The mounds of black rock that were scattered irregularly across the sand further south, dominate the landscape here. Stout mounds of burning black and purple boulders tumble towards the narrow plains of sand just off the road. They give shelter from the wind and I ride quickly northwards. Near town the rocky outcrops recede into dunes and the gravel returns to sand. I see the fringes of the lake ahead and the cluster of buildings on its bank, which look so grand after the emptiness behind. In the lokanda I sleep on a rope bed in a full courtyard. Men in jalibiyas lie everywhere, scattered like discarded clothes, and spit and snore and smoke through the hot night.

In town the next day I pass the occasional weathered white face on the dusty streets. I see Nico, whose thick auburn beard is longer then when we last met in Addis Ababa. He is backpacking north and we have met in Botswana, Zambia, Ethiopia, and now here. There is a French couple, dirtier than me, who have walked here from South Africa. And Eduardo, an Argentine with a thick grey moustache, in an all-in-one Addis tracksuit. He speaks no English and tells stories with animated expressions like a silent cartoon, screwing his face up and drawing streams of tears from his eyes, with his fingers, to show sadness, and bending over, clasping both fists, and letting out energetic whooshes, to mime bicycling.

He tells how he rode a scooter from Morocco, aiming for the World Cup in South Africa. By the time it was over he had only reached Nigeria, so he decided he would see the pyramids instead. He crossed the Central African Republic into Sudan and now he is here waiting for the boat. In Central African Republic he got stuck in the mud in the jungle. He was found by monkey hunters on bicycles. They helped him out and he lived with them for three days, eating monkeys, until they reached the border.

We sit around in the shade eating beans and falafel, waiting for the boat, which leaves for Egypt tomorrow.

From Dongola

I ride alongside the wall of a heavily guarded compound, encircling the towering mirrored fortresses of the security services headquarters. I cross the Nile, where a lone rowing boat drifts between metal pylons that rise from the murky water. Into Omdurman, around the crowded alleys of the souk, and further north, through scruffier streets, past lower dwellings, tattered flags and donkeys with bleeding backs. I have ridden fifty kilometres since leaving the cool sanctuary of John's flat, and still I am in Khartoum. Abruptly the city ends and the desert begins.

A straight band of smooth black tarmac severs the coarse brown sand in two. There is a low escarpment of pale sandstone far to the east and small mud-brick cubes stand isolated and crumbling on the silent horizon. The boat to Egypt leaves Wadi Halfa in a week and I must ride 950 km across the desert to make it.

Patches of thin grey cloud hang high above the sand, filtering the sun's strong rays into a grainy haze. On the roadside the sand is thick with dark pebbles and further off the grains merge into an indistinct plain of dull orange. Scrawny plants, the colour of parched lime flesh, cling to the barren earth and for long stretches worn acacias are the only forms on the endless flats. There are villages far from the road; clusters of twenty square blocks, camels and a beaten-up buggy and billowing white jalibiyas flowing from coal-black faces. I stop at a cafeteria and eat a bowl of beans amongst the flies and the praying truck drivers, and fill up with water from thick stone urns, shaded by a straw orning. Close to sundown I pull off the road and pitch my tent beside a derelict mud wall, to shelter from the wind.

I wake at three and ride through the dark. Twin lamps bob up and down, miles ahead, peering out across the sand, and the silence is broken as the truck passes, and then it is quiet and black. Gradually the fine contours of the sands become discernible and colour separates the desert from the sky. The horizon is pale pink and the sands moon-grey in the morning twilight. Soon the sun burns yellow, growing visible in fragments at a time, as wisps of morning cloud melt before it, slowly revealing a full circle. I am amongst high dunes of caramel sands, speckled with molten black rocks, rough amidst the shimmering smooth mounds of sand. The sparse patches of green have ended and beyond the frail telephone lines to the west there is mile upon mile of golden wilderness. Far ahead I see a faint outline of a rectangle, thickening into form as I approach. I wheel the bike through the deep sand and an old man gives me a glass of tea. His sons are sprawled out on straw mats, all in white jalibiyas. I wonder where the women are, and what they are doing.

Back on the road the air is hot and the wind floods towards me, gripping the thick tyres, and slowing me to a crawl. A constant gust rushes in my ears and I am already tiring. The sun is higher, the sand the same; pock-marked where the wind has whisked it up and set it, swirling, down. For sixty kilometres I see nothing and then over the brow of a broad dune, the crescent-tipped spire of a tall minaret, gleaming white, comes into view. I press hard on the pedals against the wind, and turn into a truck stop on the edge of the little village, where I spend the night.

Men talk till late into the night, and groaning trucks pull into the dust, and a butcher hammers his cleaver through legs of meat, thudding loudly on the wooden counter. My body is tired, but I cannot sleep, and a thick pool of sweat coats my dusty mat. I pack up and ride for hours through the cool darkness. The sun rises and the wind is relentless. Plains of bare sand stretch out to meet high dunes to east and west. And the road blazes flat and straight across it all. Far ahead I can see a line of green and as I get closer I see mosques and a petrol station and low, mud-walled homes. I cannot see the water, but I can trace the Nile by the long line of tall palms that rise from its banks. The villages are continuous here, low and sprawling, covering the sand between the river and the road. I ride all day and sleep in the courtyard of a restaurant in a riverside village.

It is a hundred kilometres to Dongola, the only town between Khartoum and the lake. The road archs back and forth between the desert and the river, and torrents of dry air flow heavily towards me, pinning me back, as if I were dragging an anchor. I turn into town after lunch and ride through empty streets. Metal shutters hide shop facades and the souk is desolate. It is Friday and everyone is praying. I sit for an hour beneath a tree and watch the streets gradually awaken; cars and bicycles slowly return to the roads, and shop doors are unlocked. I am given a rope bed in the courtyard of a guesthouse and sleep just as night begins to fall.