Memories of Libya.

    The desert was very large and dramatically empty.    It flowed around our little oil field camp deep in the Sahara.  It was rustled by a wind from the depths of Africa.    Sand built up on runways and stopped the little supply plane landing.   Sand blew in through any door not sealed shut and it would cover the floor a foot deep.   Sand blew away the foundations of the concrete pump bases.   Sand was never still.     Near to us a small detachment of workers were combing a sector for the unexploded shells and grenades from two wars - the sand sometimes revealed them, mostly hid them.
    And when it was still, it was very very still.   It glistened.   It was full of colour, full of strange shapes and slopes.     A sense of life paused.      
    Once this desert had been the bottom of a primitive ocean.      It was littered still with sea shells and shark’s teeth still white and sometimes sharp.     The surface in parts had the rigid ripples of a retreating tide that tried to shake our truck to pieces as we drove over it.  We decided it was better to drive really fast and make it more like a roller coaster ride - but we knew the slightest patch of loose sand could turn the vehicle over.
    So surreal to be at the bottom of a waterless ocean.     You couldn’t call them hills, those high sheer sided uneroded remnants of long ago that that dwarfed our journeys and looked like giant freshly baked loaves of bread. 
    Strange that this surface so many millions of years old was hiding another thousands of feet below that was once forest but is now oil being pumped to the surface through a steel pipe.
    Upon this world of sand the sun shone unrelentingly by day and at night the stars did look like diamonds bright and vivid.  Their light pierced the soul.
    This restless world beneath my feet did seem eternal and yet it measured time too - but it measured time in the tick of a clock that mocked all our histories and ever will.