Monday 24 March (day 24)

We left Khartoum today driving north to Meroe on the Khartoum-Atbara highway about 270km on a paved road.  The road was perfect taking us through flat, hot, dry land.  We stopped to pick up tomatoes, potatoes, bananas and oranges and a little later some fresh bread and fried fish.  As we move on from the sprawl of Khartoum there is nothing growing except the occasional scrub brush and acacia tree and lots of sand dotted with black volcanic rock.  Every once and a while a small village or maybe only a cluster of houses would appear.  All the buildings are made entirely from the earth and blend into their surrounding – you almost miss them as you drive by.  The only painted building in any of these places is a small mosque painted bright white and green. We also saw herders out in the heat of the day.  Often just one person sitting on a donkey wrapped in white with a turban and herding some goats or camels.  There is no shade and no water that we have seen and they seem to be miles from anywhere when we see them by the side of the road.  By late afternoon we see the pyramids of the Royal Cemetery of Meroe on the side of the road.  We drive past them because we expect there to be a turn off but there isn't you just drive off the road into the desert to get there.  We come to the gate and wake the sleeping attendant and pepper him with questions from our Arabic phrase book (which he actually seems to understand!).  We can camp anywhere, it turns out, and we drive around the back of the main pyramid group into the desert hills and find a sandy spot.  We are entirely alone and it is amazingly beautiful.  As we are setting up camp 4 men on camels come by dressed in white and one is playing a long flute.  It felt like we were about to be in a nativity scene.  They were offering camel rides which we deferred to bukra, tomorrow, when the sun comes up.  As the sun was setting we walked down to the pyramids.  It is just the 4 of us as far as we can see or hear, looking at these pyramids from a civilization 800 B.C. As we cook dinner over the bbq the stars fill the sky and just before bed we sit in silence to watch the almost full moon rise over the hills.