Text 1: When the horizon disappeared, by Safiya Cole

An original contemporary magazine feature.

At noon, the desert is pale enough to hurt my eyes. Mariam Nasser, the ranger driving us between two field stations, points through the windscreen at a brown line along the western horizon. It is so straight that I mistake it for a distant ridge.

“That is moving,” she says.

The line thickens as I watch. It seems to stitch earth to sky, and then it begins swallowing both. Mariam turns the vehicle towards a low bank of rock and stops. Her voice changes. “Cases shut. Windows up. Stay inside.” Five minutes earlier, we had been discussing where to eat lunch. Now she checks every door twice.

The first sand reaches us with a sound like a fistful of gravel thrown against a door. Then the main wall arrives. Daylight turns copper and disappears. There is no longer an earth or a sky, only dust racing sideways through the beams of the headlights. The vehicle rocks on its springs.

I had imagined that a sandstorm would whisper. In fact, it roars continuously, like a train passing inches from my head. Fine powder pushes through the air vents and settles on my tongue. Mariam examines the vents, checks the radio and calmly recites our supplies: water, food, blankets and two lamps. Her list is clearly intended for me. She does not need reminding.

Although the doors are locked and the windows closed, the vehicle suddenly feels very small indeed. Mariam catches me staring at the roof as another gust presses down on it. I pretend to be interested in the floor.

Forty-seven minutes after it began, the noise drops away. Sunlight returns so quickly that it is as if someone has pressed a switch. Sand is heaped against the wheels, our tyre tracks have vanished and three marker posts beside the route have disappeared beneath a smooth new slope.

Mariam gets out, studies the altered ground and laughs. “The desert has edited our map,” she says.

I had thought of this landscape as empty scenery through which we would pass. Now it looks newly made, every line changed. We continue only when Mariam is satisfied that she knows our position. For the rest of the journey, I stop imagining that the desert is standing still.

Text 2: A day made of dust, by Wilfred Ames

An original letter written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

In this letter, written in 1882, a traveller describes crossing a desert with a small caravan.

My dear Frederick,

You asked me to write of the great emptiness through which we travelled. I am ashamed to tell you that I used that very word in Ishaq's hearing on the morning of the storm. Before evening, the desert had answered me.

The day began without a breath of wind. At about three o'clock Ishaq halted his camel and pointed behind us. I saw only a stain upon the distance, but he ordered the baggage ropes tightened and made every animal kneel. When I asked the reason, he replied, “The yellow darkness is coming.” I confess that I thought him needlessly solemn over a little dust.

Within minutes, the sun had faded to a red coin. Ishaq dragged a heavy woollen rug over our heads and commanded me to crouch against the camel's side. Then the wind struck.

Sand found my ears, my collar and even the corners of my closed eyes. It stung my hands until I thrust them inside my coat. The wind shrieked over us and pulled so fiercely at the rug that I expected it to tear away. I could see nothing beyond my own sleeve. The whole world had become the patch of cloth over my mouth and Ishaq's hand upon my shoulder.

I cannot say whether we remained so for one hour or five. Sand gathered around my boots and climbed my legs. I became certain that we should be buried where we crouched, and each breath seemed smaller than the one before it. Whenever I tried to rise, Ishaq forced me down again. He spoke steadily, though the storm stole most of his words. I remember only, “Wait. I am here.”

At last the pressure weakened. We pushed the rug aside and emerged into a brown twilight. One water vessel had split, two bundles lay half buried and not a single track remained. Yet all six camels were alive and Ishaq greeted each one as though welcoming an old friend home.

You will understand that I no longer call the desert empty. Empty places do not seize a man by the shoulders and reduce his world to one breath at a time. It is a country with a will, and I shall not insult it again.

Your affectionate brother,

Wilfred