I, who normally sleep so securely that I have rarely been able to recall my dreams on wakening, had experienced the childish nightmare too, in the past few months. There had been a midsummer night in London when I had dreamt myself deep into the Sahara, among endless sand dunes and a formless, panic-stricken sense of being lost and in peril. I could not tell whether I had failed to find a vital water hole, or whether I was just hopelessly unable to decide which way I must go to safety; the images were inexact, only the torment was penetratingly clear. As I emerged from the horror of it, my body streaming with sweat, my mouth bitterly dry, the woman I loved helped me to safety again.

But now, in this room on the edge of the desert, there was no A to calm my fears. Nor were the fearful images inexact any more. For two or three weeks I had prowled around this rim of the Sahara, preparing myself for my journey. I could visualise its beginning with some clarity, and I now had the name of a companion to give a tiny substance to any event my imagination conjured up. As the child's screams dwindled into sobs and died with a whimper, I lay blankly and widely awake for a while. A couple of dogs barked down by the marketplace, where all the commerce of Islam heaved and badgered and bartered during the day. Then silence and nothing, nothing, nothingness stretching away to infinity around my room. On one side there was an infinity of ocean, on the other three an infinity of desert, all threatening this small remnant of civilisation which man had contrived against nature. What a folly it seemed to abandon that so wilfully.

Gradually, the images crept out of the corners of the room and shaped themselves over my bed. I saw myself asleep somewhere out in the nothingness, then wakening suddenly at some sound. Appalled, I saw that Mohamed was carefully leading our camels away. I was unable to move or call out from my sleeping bag, so transfixed was I by the care he took not to disturb me: he walked them down to the far side of the sand dune before mounting so that I shouldn't hear their protesting noise. By the time I'd struggled out of my bag, he'd vanished, with the camels, our water and our food. I had nothing but a sleeping bag and the dying embers of our campfire.

The sequence ended abruptly there. I shifted uneasily, aware that the blood was pumping through my chest more obviously than is normal at two o'clock in the morning. Then another image crossed my mind. Again I was awakened from sleep in the desert, but this time Mohamed was inert in his blanket nearby. Cautiously I raised my head and saw figures creeping towards us, evidently bent on murder. As one of them approached my companion, I scrambled out of my sleeping bag, kicked Mohamed awake and leapt towards the attacker, my sheath knife already drawn and in my hand. Untidily, the sequence dissolved with me rushing up a dune, pursued by a figure. I stumbled and saw his weapon -- a sword, a club or a knife -- descending. Then the vision was gone. Much gratified as I was that my fanciful response had been so heroically in the best white man's tradition, I was nevertheless left pondering for several minutes just how I would get out of my sleeping bag in such an emergency, and whether, indeed, I ought to sleep with my knife quite ready for action of that sort.

Impatient by now of these midnight movies, I switched on the light and, reaching for Solzhenitsyn, began to read myself into torpor again. But my body, I noticed, had become a little clammy, though the night was cool. I was afraid.

See Equipment List - Text from the book "The Fearful Void" by Geoffrey Moorhouse, Copyright © Geoffrey Moorhouse. - Reprinted with special permission from Aitken & Stone - All Rights Reserved. - Photography © OneWorld Magazine - All Rights Reserved.