‘Upon travelling towards the interior, one finds… the region where wild beasts live, and beyond that is the region of dunes that extends from Thebes in Egypt to the Pillars of Heracles. Along this belt, separated from one another by about ten days’ journey, are little hills formed of lumps of salt, and from the top of each gushes a spring of cold, sweet water. Men live in the neighbourhood of these springs – they are the furthest south… of any human beings…. The place is known, in Greek, as the Island of the Blessed.’ (Herodotus, IV,181.)

To the ancient Egyptians, the world was divided into two parts. One was the ‘Black Land’, the Nile Valley with its rich, fertile soil, plentiful water and green fields. Beyond it lay the ‘Red Land’, the desert, the land of death, dangerous, mysterious, the physical embodiment of chaos. The Greeks believed the desert was the home of Medusa, and only the brave risked its terrors to visit the oracle at Siwa.

Caravans loaded with slaves, salt, ivory and gold travelled up and down its dunes for millennia. Entire armies disappeared without trace; only the hardiest and most curious of explorers from around the world crossed its vast expanse.

The Western Desert – the easternmost edge of the Sahara – was formed over millions of years as a result of varying and violent climatic conditions. Once covered by sea, its contours and rocks were shaped through the effect of water, wind and volcanoes, resulting in vast massifs of granite, sandstone and limestone and a seemingly endless sea of sand dunes. But there are also areas where water bubbled to the surface, the ‘islands in the middle of the sand’ described by Herodotus, where vegetation could thrive and humans could settle.

In depressions in the land, lakes were created by the receding sea or by springs. A chain of five major oases grew in those basins, providing man with food, shelter, and, in time, permanent settlement and a very distinctive and individual desert tradition. The oases became part of Egypt, governed by the pharaohs as any other province. Towns, temples, and cemeteries from different periods of Egyptian history bear evidence to the close relationship between the oases and the centres of power and civilization along the Nile.

Yet even now visitors have the feeling of being in a different world. Away from the cacophony of modern life in Cairo and Alexandria, past the battlefields of El-Alamein, the desert stretches towards far-away Siwa, still so remote that its people speak Siwan, a berber tongue of the desert. Famed in antiquity for the oracle of Amun, it is full of saline lakes, lush palm groves, bubbling springs and remains of the famed expedition of Alexander the Great.

Travelling eastwards towards the Nile, Bahariya suddenly appears – a paradise of date palms and irrigated green fields, surrounded entirely by black volcanic hills. An extensive necropolis of Graeco-Roman mummies, recently discovered, bears witness to its importance in the economy of Hellenistic Egypt.

Continue south and you reach the unique White Desert of pure snow-white limestone rocks sculpted by the winds into unreal shapes, one of the most memorable sights of the desert. And on to tranquil Farafra, an idyllic place where time seems to have stopped. In the two southern oases of Dakhla and Kharga there are ruins of Roman forts and townships strung along the ancient slave route, the Darb el-Arba'in, side by side with Islamic and early pharaonic ruins.

On mortuary chapel ceilings in the third-century Christian cemetery at Bagawat are some of the earliest representations of Bible stories. But the desert is never far away – you are so close to the Great Sand Sea that you feel almost engulfed by the moving dunes, and at dusk you can hear their eternal song.

‘The desert is beautiful,’ said the Little Prince in Saint-Exupery’s strange and lovely tale. ‘One sits down on a desert sand dune, sees nothing, hears nothing. Yet through the silence something throbs, and gleams…. What makes the desert beautiful,’ said the Little Prince, ‘is that somewhere it hides a well…’

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