Yangykala Canyon is a line of cliffs several hundred metres high in the Balkan province of western Turkmenistan, in the desert east of the Caspian Sea, banded red, orange, pink and chalk white, the floor of a vanished sea standing in the open with no road, gate or building, and it is reached by an unmarked track that becomes a matter of the driver's memory past the last shrine. The colours are the layers of the Tethys, the sea that covered this ground until a few million years ago, and the pale bands are old reef and lagoon rock, so that walking the rim with eyes down turns up shells and broken coral loose in the gravel, hundreds of metres above a waterless desert; the mesas and spurs of the canyon run for kilometres in a landscape that looks like the American Southwest with nobody in it, and the way in forks at Gozli Ata, the tomb of a fourteenth-century Sufi teacher and the only place with people in it for many miles, where the gravel road turns to dirt and the tyre lines across the badlands are the route.
The light is the reason for the timing. Sitting on a spur in the late afternoon and letting the sun do the work, the walls go from pink to red to a glow that looks lit from within, and the camps are pitched on the plateau hours from the nearest light, where with the engines off the silence is total, no traffic, no aircraft, no other camp, and the galactic core stands over the mesas around midnight in June and July. A loop of about ten kilometres leaves the plateau, drops down a steep scree face and follows the base of the walls that were looked down on. Turkmenistan admits few visitors and all with a guide, so the canyon sees a handful of cars a week. Yangykala is a sea floor stood on end in the desert, and the evening is when it burns.