The White Desert is a field of chalk-white rock scattered across the Sahara of Egypt's Western Desert, near the oasis of Farafra, and most of it is standing on stems too thin to look safe. Each block carries a harder cap on top. The northerly wind drives sand that grinds hardest at ground level, so the base wears away faster than the crown, and what is left of the block looks like a giant mushroom. None of it is finished. Every formation is being whittled down and will come apart in the end, so the field standing tonight is a stage rather than a sculpture. On foot among them you can pick out the grooves the wind has cut. You can also see what the rock is made of: the chalk was built from the shells of microscopic sea creatures, and their fossils are still in it, with shells and sea-urchin remains lying underfoot. It formed on the bed of the Tethys Sea, which covered northern Egypt until about 66 million years ago.
The night is the reason people come out here. Camps are pitched among the formations, a hundred kilometres from any town or paved road. You settle by a chalk tower with a clear western horizon well before sunset, and the rock goes from glaring white to gold, then rose and violet. It keeps a faint glow long after the day visitors have driven off. Dinner is cooked over a fire and the temperature drops fast. Waking in the small hours, you find a sky so crowded with stars that the familiar ones are hard to pick out. A fennec fox, tiny and enormously eared, sometimes comes to the edge of the firelight. The wind does not stop while you sleep. The tower you pitched beside is a little narrower at the base than it was, and one night the cap will come down.