The Nubian Desert by Philip Marsden

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The ferryman steered his craft across the moonlit Nile. Above was the starry canopy of sky, ahead a black frieze of date palms. It was late. Khartoum was only 14 hours behind us, but we had already lost one vehicle in the Bayuda desert with a cracked cylinder-head, and we had dropped six hours on our schedule. Over the next eight days, somehow we never did manage to make up those hours.

But, who was counting? Certainly not the ferryman. He had gone home for the day long before we tracked him down. "I do not want to know what is your business," he said with his mouth full of rice, "until you have sat and eaten with me."

So, it was another hour before we followed his white jellabiyeh and his donkey as he rode, whistling, down to the river. He was glad of the business. He was saving up, and when he had saved up enough, he was going to take his ferry down-river and blow it all on Ethiopian women.

Midnight had come and gone by the time we reached the deserted city of Old Dongola. We drove through sand which rose in drifts against the sides of collapsed buildings. We drove past the church, a silhouetted cube standing alone on a knoll. We pulled to a halt beside the colonnade of an old basilica and pitched our tents for the night. But it was much better to take sleeping bags in among the ruins, to lay pillows on the baked-sand bricks and feel, as we slept, the cool wind of the Nubian desert on our faces.

As well as being one of the most beautiful sections of the entire Nile, the stretch around Dongola is also one of the more isolated. Four cataracts and a vast S in the river pushed the old caravan routes far to the east and left this region to its own devices. In such fertile, out-of-the-way places, people tend to develop their own variations on mainstream belief, practice them with a raw passion and use the guile and courage of threatened minorities to protect it. These are the people who have always interested me most.

For 800 years, Dongola was the capital of a Christian kingdom, which should have survived no more than 150 years. It was sacked by the Arabs in 652. But, although the Nubian Christians paid occasional tribute to Egypt, they clung doggedly to their faith. By the 16th century, it was all over. They were begging the highland Ethiopians to send them priests. The Ethiopians could do nothing for them and Dongola began its long slow slide into the sand.

After the Nubian Christians the area was dominated by the Shaigia Muslims. A war-like tribe of great beauty and uncertain origin, they rode into battle chanting to their enemies "Peace be with You!" (That is, the peace of death.) They considered guns a cowardly invention and were in the end wiped out by volley after volley of Turkish firepower.

After that, this wild region was frog-marched into a greyer age of nation-states where it has remained, tamed and more or less obedient, ever since. Along the date-lined banks of the Nile are the relics of those peoples who carved out their own world here - not only the Nubians and the Shaigia but the Kushites and before them the little-known Kerma culture.

I had been waiting for the chance to visit Nubia for 18 years. I had first read of this isolated corner of Africa while researching another - the Amhara heartland of Ethiopia. The chance came when a friend of my wife was posted to the British Embassy in Khartoum. Together, we hatched a plan.

But, the Americans also had a plan. Their plan involved a cruise missile which, to help protect the world from Islamic terrorism, successfully destroyed a pharmeceutical factory on the edge of Khartoum. The British bleated their support, the embassy was stormed by a mob and our friend fled to Nairobi. It was another year before we reached the Sudan.

There were 10 of us who woke that first morning among the ruins of old Dongola: three drivers, a cook, a guide, my wife, her father, our friend from the embassy, his partner Dr Bojana (a Macedonian Egyptologist) and Lindy from Northern Ireland. Our ages ranged from early 20s to nearly 80. We had five tents strapped to the roof of the vehicles, jerry cans filled with fuel and water, bags of fruit and olives, ice boxes of meat and cheese, a satellite phone and a hand-held GPS.

At midday, the expedition left Dongola and pushed north into the desert. For more than a week we drove in convoy on roads that were sometimes narrow and rutted, sometimes multi-stranded tracks and sometimes not roads at all but just the wide-open desert. Our world was sand - soft sand, impacted sand, pebbly sand, wind-blown sand that gathered in drifts or rose into dunes, sand that browned the waters of the Nile, that turned to mud in neat riparian plots, that seeped into every corner of our lives so that when hands were pushed into pockets they found pools of fine, egg-timer sand and when we closed our eyes at night we saw nothing but the bouncing plains of sand ahead, stretching out to a sandy horizon.

The vehicles did not always cope. Approaching the town of Kerma on that first afternoon we got stuck for the third time. I took the opportunity to ask Dr Bojana about the Kerma culture. It was not her particular period and she herself had never been here. But she was in no doubt about the significance of its date: 2800 BC, at the very beginning of the Dynastic period.

Until that afternoon I had held a lazy prejudice against the ancient Egyptians. I'd tried - at Giza and Saqqara and in the National Museum of Cairo. But, they were just too ancient. They never induced anything like the awe, for instance, I'd felt on seeing Cairo's unmatched range of Islamic monuments. The mosques breathed life, celebrated form and were still used for prayer. All the pyramids appeared to be peddling was death, long-vanished power and a crude and brutal symmetry.

In my ignorance, I had supposed that Egyptian civilisation spread up the Nile, stumbled on the first of the cataracts and petered out in the great loop in which we were travelling. Not true, said Bojana. Many of the remains of Upper Egypt pre-date those further north. In the pre-dynastic period, it was Mesopotamia and its ziggurats that provided the model for the Egyptians. Contacts spread across Arabia, across the Red sea to the Upper Nile - not far north of where we stood. The interest of the Kerma culture was that it represented a branch of the Old Kingdom, the very first period of Egyptian history, and thus one of the oldest civilisations in the world.

It was after nine when we reached camp. We pulled onto a flat piece of ground on the edge of Kerma. A bank of undulating sand rose at one end, paced by sentinel hounds. A vast edifice stood in the middle. Its partly eroded walls made it more like a natural formation, a mini-Ayers rock, rather than the mud-brick Kerma temple that had survived for nearly five thousand years.

Late at night we walked out to it. Animal bones crunched beneath our feet. The dogs barked from their dunes. The temple's shape became more and more ambiguous. Worn walls reformed themselves into a series of buttresses and rounded finials, bearded caryatids, zoomorphic statues. Its shadows suggested rooms and stairways. We entered the narrow aisle, open to the stars. We did not hear anything; we did not see anything - but all at once we hurried out. It was the eeriest place I have ever visited. None of us wanted to be the last to leave.

Dawn chased away the night's ghosts. I lay watching the sun pour through the flaps of the tent. Reaching for a t-shirt, I saw that the sand beneath me was mixed with countless pieces of desiccated bone.

In the middle of the town of Kerma was another site of the same period. It was dominated by a much larger temple, but in the same state of sculpted erosion. I stood with Bojana on top of it. In the compound below you could make out the plan of the palace and all the ancillary buildings.

The ruler of Kerma, explained Bojana, was a priest-king. On high days he would have been carried to the temple for celebrations and sacrifices.

I asked her what she thought had gone on inside.

"Nothing," she was looking thoughtfully at the steps leading up the monument. "The ceremonies - sacrifices or whatever they were, did not take place inside. They took place here, on top. This is not a temple. It's a ziggurat."

At dusk that evening the sun dropped into the western horizon with the precision of a billiard ball. We were driving north. The Nile was on our left. As the glow of the sun faded so the full moon rose to the east and all the symmetry of this region became clear: its crisp divisions between night and day, sun and moon, water and desert.

For the next three days we pushed downstream, towards the second cataract. The roads turned from bad to worse. Much of the time it was like driving over corrugated iron. We followed the river or cut through open desert. We slept at the third cataract. We crossed and recrossed the river in small boats. We saw the remains of the temple at Sulib, rock carvings, citadels. We were late, everywhere.

Provisions were running low - so low that pulling into the town of Dongola (new Dongola, far to the north of Old Dongola) we found ourselves full of oasis fever at the sight of tomatoes, oranges, bananas and dates. We crossed the river to go to the meat market but there was nothing to buy. Only a month earlier the town had been flooded. Six feet of water had sluiced through the town and washed away hundreds of homes. For the first time that week, we were looking at real ruins.

There was one great site left to see: Jebel Barkal - a sacred table-top mountain rising beside the Nile. But to get there required slicing off a bend in the river and driving the desert road. "This road," announced our guide, grinning, "is known as the Route of Death."

It was already four in the afternoon by the time we put new Dongola behind us. The last spread-out buildings gave way to scrub and the scrub gave way to desert. Somewhere on the southern horizon was a brown smudge. It grew as it came towards us and the air filled with sand. Spindrifts were flicked from the tops of the dunes. The wave-like shapes of the far hills were already indistinct. There was no sunset. The day dissolved into a brown haze, then darkness.

We drove in silence. The headlights of the first vehicle bounced up and down. Sometimes they veered off one way or another, and we had to follow them. Sometimes on harder ground they disappeared for a moment. Sometimes they did not reappear and we drove around for some time looking for them.

At about nine o'clock, the first vehicle topped a ridge, hit a patch of soft sand and stuck fast. The wheels spun and the vehicle dropped deeper. A few of us tumbled out and huddled in the wind to assess our position. Here we were at night in a dust-storm, one vehicle was stuck up to its axle. We were on the Route of Death - or not: we had no idea where we were. Morale, we agreed, was top priority. We went over to bolster the second vehicle and were greeted with hoots of laughter from Bojana and Lindy.

"You boys," said Lindy, "taking it all so seriously! If we were at sea, I'd be worried - but the desert, well, we just make camp and carry on in the morning."

She was right. We dug the vehicle free, took a GPS fix and found Jebel Barkal to be on a reading of 149 degrees. For another hour we drove a course a few points to the south of Orion's Belt, then arranged the vehicles in a row. We put up the tents in their lee. The wind was still strong. We gathered wood for a fire. But the desert is full of deceptions. In the heat of the day it spreads a mirage of water over the horizon. In the cool of the evening, it offers dried tree trunks - but the tree trunks turn out to have been petrified for more than a hundred million years.

Few pleasures can beat this, this bowling across unbroken sand at 120 kph with the desert flat and yellow in every direction and it is eight in the morning and the great blue bowl of the sky is above us and the sun is rising to the left. The surface here is soft. They call it kapat, from the Arabic verb "to catch" and if we drop our speed even a fraction we will be caught - and that is why we must bowl across it at 120 kph with the sky blue above us and the sand flat before us and there on the horizon dead ahead is rising the thin black line of Jebel Barkal's plateau.

Jebel Barkal is one of those natural features whose sudden presence in the landscape makes it a natural contender for all sorts of beliefs. A temple of Amun lies at the foot of its sheer southern face. To one side is a small group of Kushite pyramids and a few kilometres beyond them are the tombs of some of the most powerful of the Kushite rulers. There is also a horse cemetery in the area.

Before the mountain itself is a pinnacle so precarious that it was only studied in detail in the late 1980s. Egyptologist Timothy Kendall spent a winter training to be a mountaineer and even then had to bring his tutor with him to scale the rock. He suggests that, dressed in gold, the rock represented the cobra - the protective deity of Egyptian kingship. Facing south, the cobra was keeping at bay the wild Kushites and beyond them the infinite lands of the south.

Evening came quickly. It was the first evening in a week that we had not been driving. We made camp at the foot of the mountain. After dark the local authorities came and told us we could not camp there. We must stay at the "Government Rest Home" in Karima. They would take no dissent. Wearily we took down the tents and followed the apparatchiks' pick-up into town. The Rest Home was a shock - full of strip lights and concrete. We all missed our tents, and the sounds of the desert and its cleanness, and the sand.