Merzouga is a village at the edge of the Sahara in southeastern Morocco, near the Algerian border, and behind it rises Erg Chebbi, a range of orange sand 22 kilometres long with dunes climbing 150 metres, crossed by camel to Berber camps pitched between the crests. The road from Marrakech or Fes crosses the Atlas and a stony plain, and then the sand stands up out of the plain like a wall, pale gold at noon and deep orange as the sun drops. The classic day starts in the late afternoon, when the heat has eased and the light turns low and gold, with a camel caravan swaying out across the sand, the village shrinking behind, to a tented camp in a hollow between the ridges, the way desert travellers always camped; with tagine, drumming by the fire and a sky full of stars. Before dawn you leave camp in the dark and climb the tallest dune above it, feet sinking into cool loose sand with every step, to watch the sun come up over Algeria.
The dunes are a playground as well as a picture: boards slide down the steep leeward faces, and 4x4s cross the sand at speed, climbing and dropping over the ridges. The caravans that crossed this sand carried gold north out of West Africa and salt south to pay for it, on a route that ran to Timbuktu. In summer, from June to September, the sand gets hot enough that people come to be buried in it up to the neck as a cure for rheumatism, sweating within minutes. After a wet winter the shallow salt lake of Dayet Srji fills west of the village and flamingos arrive to feed through spring; in dry years the lakebed stays bare. A local story says the dunes are a punishment, a storm that buried a town overnight after its people turned away a poor mother and child. Merzouga is the Sahara at the end of a road, and the camels still walk into it every afternoon.