Yangykala is a line of cliffs sixty to a hundred metres high in western Turkmenistan, banded red, orange and chalk white, and the whole thing is the floor of a sea that has gone. Nothing prepares you for it. The plateau runs level to the horizon with no fence, gate or building on it. Past the shrine at Gozli Ata the road turns to dirt and the route becomes a matter of the driver's memory: tyre lines across the badlands, no signs. Then the ground opens and an amphitheatre of striped cliffs stands on three sides of you. There is no scale to hold on to, so you pick a boulder on the far wall and watch it shrink into nothing. The pale bands are old reef and lagoon rock: walking the rim with your eyes down turns up shells and broken coral in the gravel, a hundred metres above a desert where nothing flows. They died where you find them, and they belong to the place rather than to a pocket.
Late afternoon is what the drive is for. From a spur on the rim the shadows of the mesas stretch across the canyon floor, the walls run through copper and rose, and for a few minutes the fortresses look genuinely lit from within. A loop of about ten kilometres leaves the plateau, drops a steep scree face and takes you along the base of the same walls. That is the only way to stand underneath the layers and see how far above you they run, and it takes three or four hours. Anyone who stays the night camps on the plateau hours from the nearest light, and with the engines off the silence is total: no traffic, no aircraft, no other camp. The heat goes out of the ground fast and the cold comes in. The sea that laid all this down never entirely left. The Caspian, a little way west, is its last remnant, and it has fallen about two metres since the mid-1990s: the same retreat the striped rock behind you already recorded once.