Egypt, Chapter IV — Inside the Desert, Before the Encounters
The city ended without ceremony. The last buildings fell behind, asphalt began to lose its authority, and ahead came dirt roads, bare mountains, and old four-wheel drives raising enough dust to hide, for a few seconds, the world we had left.
Entering the desert meant allowing things to diminish. First the buildings, then the signs, antennas, people, and finally the noise. What remained were earth, sky, and uncertain tracks crossing the landscape without offering the slightest guarantee they would actually lead anywhere. The vehicles jolted over the stones on suspensions that had probably stopped believing in God many miles before we did.
Beyond the window, the landscape seemed to repeat itself and yet changed constantly. Sand became rock, hills opened into valleys, the sun vanished behind a ridge and reappeared farther on, as though it too were searching for the road. Now and then came an isolated building, a small mosque, a tree stubborn enough to grow in the wrong place, or a distant vehicle reduced to a dot inside a space that seemed to have no need for human presence.
The desert was quiet, but not empty. Emptiness is something dead; that land possessed an alert, ancient, almost arrogant calm. It did not try to entertain me, did not ask to be photographed well, and seemed particularly uninterested in my personal crises. It had existed long before I began wondering about my purpose and would carry on peacefully after my final piece of bullshit.
And yet that was exactly why it let me breathe.
When the outer world empties, whatever you carry inside begins to lose its hiding places. There are no notifications, shop windows, pointless conversations, or sufficiently urgent commitments to keep you from hearing what you continue to postpone. There is only you, the questions you brought that far, and the irritating knowledge that crossing the desert will not automatically make you wiser, but may at least strip away a few excuses.
I know, “a journey within yourself” is the sort of phrase normally found in an advertisement for a two-thousand-euro spiritual retreat, beside a photograph of a woman dressed in linen contemplating the sunrise without a mortgage, hemorrhoids, or parking problems. But that time the metaphor did not feel entirely false. Every mile through the dust carried me farther from the part of myself accustomed to filling everything and toward something I did not yet know.
The sun began to descend, lengthening the shadows of the mountains and turning the earth into an expanse of copper, ash, and dirty gold. For a few minutes the desert seemed to hold its breath. Even the engines, once stopped, left behind a silence so vast that many of the things I had allowed to torment me suddenly looked ridiculous.
I had not found answers yet. I had not met the best version of myself, and no voice from the heavens had decided to explain what the fuck I was supposed to do with my life. But I was ready to enter.
With the camera.
With my desires still unresolved.
With the overgrown child sitting somewhere inside me, for once polite enough not to keep asking when we would arrive.
Ahead waited the desert, the people who inhabited it, and everything I did not yet know I had come to find.
For the moment, the road and the silence were enough.
The real journey began there.