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The train for Touggourt stood baking beneath a near-vertical sun. It was full of sand. Sand grated under our feet, there was sand on the tattered and bleached upholstery... where there was upholstery. There were no compartments. Four sat facing four all the way through a long wooden box with a narrow gap at one side for pedestrian traffic.

Soon the palm trees thinned out, the mountains faded into haze. It was like leaving a harbour and entering an unknown and limitless sea. Sand dunes covered with a kind of green scrub extended on either side. Ahead the single rail-track ran due south, a slender metal arrow aimed at the Equator. We were in the centre of a perfect circle neatly bisected by a railway line.

From the little platform at the back of our coach the scene was almost ferocious in its featurelessness. The rails, flanked by crude telegraph poles, rushed away to the horizon without the suspicion of a curve. The optical illusion of parallel lines meeting at infinity was proven. We were not in the desert. This was to the Sahara as a doorstep is to a house of a hundred rooms.

From this point the world changed for me. At a tiny station all passengers left the train - to spread cloths upon the platform, kick off their sandals, face Mecca, meditate and prostrate themselves. A richly-dressed Arab used his spotless burnoose as a prayer-mat and shared it with the shabby little train-guard. No Sunday-morning-at-eleven religion this, no distinction of class. I wondered if the train timetable was geared to reach a station at prayer-time. I tried to imagine British timetables similarly geared. Imagination failed. Later the train halted, hooted and whistled to scare away a camel-herd encamped upon the line.

In the midst of nowhere, a few Arabs descended and trudged away towards an empty horizon with no more concern than a clerk descending from the 6.15 at Surbiton. Flies colonised us. We cursed and beat the air. Our neighbours remained relaxed and let the flies crawl.

The waterless desert? We passed small oases where artesian wells spouted water into the air while handsome children shrieked and danced amid the spray. As at Biskra the water fed a thousand irrigation channels. The greatest lack for desert-dwellers is fuel and metal. The sparse green scrub is forage for beasts while the spiny stems, dried, can be burned. Where there was water there were women scrubbing clothes, their own garments of colours so brilliant that my eyes dazzled. Scarlets, yellows and greens burned with brightness beneath a sun which cast little shadow. After many hours we reached our first curve near an array of sand-hills. With a scream from the engine, our train drew into Touggourt.

Thrusting his way through the crowd came a little figure in a snowy turban and burnoose. He was about sixty with a little pointed, grizzled beard. He had humorous eyes in a wrinkled face and a voice which added softness to the French - his only language apart from Arabic. He was Mustapha who would pilot us during our stay. ‘Hotel Transatlantique?’ he enquired, and began heaving our valises through the window to some waiting myrmidons.

Touggourt was not the collection of mud huts we had feared. The streets were wide and clean - though sandy - and a few French officers were taking an evening promenade with their wives - the men wearing baggy Moroccan ankle-length trousers embroidered with gold.

Difficult to condense the happenings of the next days. Mustapha and a certain M. Barbot opened a new world for us. To compare the Kasbah of Algiers with the native quarter of Touggourt was to discover that comparison was impossible. Here houses as such did not exist - there were long, cool tunnels pierced at intervals by doors and with a low ramp upon each side. Behind the doors a couple of rooms - beautifully clean, as we saw when a door opened. Seated upon the ramp, here and there, were a few men playing dominoes or chatting in friendly fashion.

I was surprised by the lack of smells as goats came wandering - even the occasional camel. The tunnel roof was pierced at intervals and sunlight streamed in together with a million flies. But the flies remained in the sunlight. I could pass through them as if passing through a bead-curtain. Everywhere we received a courteous greeting from the people, but the children scattered towards their homes.

As we emerged from the tunnels of Touggourt the desert met us. In the distance stood a lonely domed structure. Within, Mustapha told a tale of long-ago cruelties and power-hungry rulers. I translated for my companions as best I could but this is only the shadow of the tale he told me, his small bright eyes looking up at me out of his crinkled brown face, eager to see if I had understood. The tale was bloody.

'Long ago, very long ago, hundreds of years ago, three kings there were who kept their state in this land. They were cold, proud and haughty, feared by all men. Very rich they were too, in gold, silver and precious stones, in brocades of marvellous and intricate design, sewn with thread of precious metal by hundreds of skilled slaves. They were as greedy as they were rich, and more cruel than you could believe. Hundreds of caravans brought them gifts from many lands. They took and took - and were not satisfied. Men seeking justice or craving audience spent great sums on gifts, yet trembled as they offered them.

'Did these rulers consider a gift offered to be unworthy or consider the donor could have brought more, the unhappy one was led with his gift to the gates of the city. There his head was struck off and his body divided into quarters which were hung up by the gate, together with his gift. Many they were who died thus and sometimes the kings would take their wives and children, putting them to the sword also. All those so slain are buried in one place and its name is known to us as 'The Tomb of the Victims of the Kings.'

Reaching the square building we walked through the single gate and entered a courtyard which was half-buried in fine, loose sand. Mustapha swept his hand about: 'Everywhere they are buried,' he said, 'but most of all - here.' He indicated a low doorway and we passed within to find a long vaulted chamber, the roof upheld by squat pillars of great solidity. Many slabs of stone lay there, ranged in rows, most of them bearing three protuberances, one at the head, one in the middle and one at the foot. Men were buried here. Those with two protuberances were women's graves. It was chill and oppressive in this sepulchre.

Was the tale true? Or was it a tale for tourists? Mustapha was a convincing storyteller. Looking back on the remainder of my journey it seems to dissolve into an Arabian fantasy. Splendid impressions are heaped one upon another like costly fabrics flung pell-mell into a chest. One thing was certain. I had a lot to learn and little time to absorb it.

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